In many cases, complex multidisciplinary research projects may show a lack of coordinated development and integration, and a big effort is often required in the final phase of the projects in order to merge software developed by heterogeneous research groups. This is particularly true in advanced robotic projects: the objective here is to deliver a system that integrates all the hardware and software components, is capable of autonomous behaviour, and needs to be deployed in realworld scenarios toward providing an impact on future research and, ultimately, on society. On the other hand, in recent years there has been a growing interest for techniques related to software integration, but these have been mostly applied to the IT commercial domain. This paper presents the work performed in the context of the project CARESSES, a multidisciplinary research project focusing on socially assistive robotics that involves 9 partners from the EU and Japan. Given the complexity of the project, a huge importance has been placed on software integration, task planning and architecture definition since the first stages of the work: to this aim, some of the practices commonly used in the commercial domain for software integration, such as merging software from the early stage, have been applied. As a case study, the document describes the steps which have been followed in the first year of the project discussing strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

Collaborative Development within a Social Robotic, Multi-Disciplinary Effort: Lesson Learnt from the CARESSES case study

Roberto Menicatti;Carmine Recchiuto;Barbara Bruno;Federico Pecora;Alessandro Saffiotti;Ha-Duong Bui;Antonio Sgorbissa
2018-01-01

Abstract

In many cases, complex multidisciplinary research projects may show a lack of coordinated development and integration, and a big effort is often required in the final phase of the projects in order to merge software developed by heterogeneous research groups. This is particularly true in advanced robotic projects: the objective here is to deliver a system that integrates all the hardware and software components, is capable of autonomous behaviour, and needs to be deployed in realworld scenarios toward providing an impact on future research and, ultimately, on society. On the other hand, in recent years there has been a growing interest for techniques related to software integration, but these have been mostly applied to the IT commercial domain. This paper presents the work performed in the context of the project CARESSES, a multidisciplinary research project focusing on socially assistive robotics that involves 9 partners from the EU and Japan. Given the complexity of the project, a huge importance has been placed on software integration, task planning and architecture definition since the first stages of the work: to this aim, some of the practices commonly used in the commercial domain for software integration, such as merging software from the early stage, have been applied. As a case study, the document describes the steps which have been followed in the first year of the project discussing strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
arso.pdf

accesso aperto

Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Dimensione 2.43 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
2.43 MB Adobe PDF Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11567/933154
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 4
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 4
social impact