Currently reusable robotics software is provided by several self contained open source projects with virtually no software reuse between them. Such partitioning leads to problems with software quality, quantity, ease evaluation and, ultimately, to poor end user experience. By reviewing of several of the projects it observes that all of them contain a mix of three types of software:
1. Driver and algorithm implementations.
2. Communication middleware.
3. Robotic software framework.
It shows that more than half of the combined code base contains software which could be reusable highly but only a small fraction of it actually is.
It argues that formal separation of the three groups in the existing and future software project would offer several potential advantages. Framework independent code availability would enable community wide library based software reuse in addition to the existing framework wide components based reuse. Another important benefit is related to procedure evaluation. The three software types are different and should be evaluated separately using different criteria. The first of two types allow quantitative comparisons which are documented well in the literature. The last one is the largest qualitative and therefore more subjective.
Software reuse in the field of robotic has been a popular topic for a number of reasons. The application domain is characterized and complex by large variability in software and hardware configurations. As a result, virtually every new system requires custom design. The sheer amount of software necessary for even the most basic competency is a quite large. These factors make reuse software attractive e.g. one hopes to integrate existing software modules within a software framework. Key of the success of the approach is reusable software availability.
The marketplace for reusable software robotic is dominated by open source offering primarily originating from and used by academic institutions. These efforts are organized into projects; Orocos, Player, Carmen, Orca, Yarp, several of which are hosted on SourceForge, net.
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