A model based engineering tool for ROS component compositioning, configuration and generation of deployment information

Abstract

Programming industrial robots requires experts -not only to create the robot applications, but also for changing them later due to different product requirements. Part of the reason for this is that all robot vendors provide their own robot programming language. Due to the language differences, robot applications cannot be reused for different robot types. Often, additional experts are required since one expert is trained only for a special robot type. This makes the use of robots uneconomical for small and medium sized enterprises. The ReApp project addresses this problem by providing a workbench based on ROS (Robot Operating System). A central part of this workbench is the skill and solution modeling tool, which allows the model-based design of robot applications composed of reusable components, and is described in this paper.