The race towards performance pushes robotic engineers to neglect the software quality attributes of a robot control system, such as maintainability, interoperability, scalability, and reusability. Software that is nicely encapsulated often simply runs slower than software that breaks encapsulation. Experience in software architecture design is about knowing when to break encapsulation to make the code run faster, and when not to do that.

Consolidated software engineering techniques have proved their effectiveness in a variety of application domains and could be adopted to build robotics systems more effective. On the other hand, robotics software development is a valuable benchmark to assess the power and discover the limits of advanced software engineering techniques when used to design, implement, and test applications that control physical equipment interacting with the real world. The synergy between Robotics and Software Engineering is strategic. Their mutual benefit isn’t merely to make software systems bigger, faster, cheaper, but rather to make it possible to build and evolve new software systems.

Important Dates

February 28th, 2024: Extended abstract submission deadline

March 15th, 2024: Notification of acceptance.

May 17th, 2024: Workshop date

Topics

This workshop focuses on several topics closely related to robot software architectures, which include:

• Analysis and comparison of different architectural paradigms for functionalities integration from low-level hardware control to high level AI reasoning   
• Architectural models that lead to reusable robotic software design   
• Analysis of issues and challenges in the design of robot software architectures   
• Application of metrics to measure nun-functional properties (e.g., robustness, availability)   
• Identification and description of structural and behavioral patterns and design principles in robot software architectures   
• Description of lessons learned in the development and deployment of large-scale, real-world integrated robot software architectures   
• Tools and approaches for automatic validation and verification of robot software architectures   
• Language- and model-based approaches for designing robot software architectures

Submission

We invite you to submit extended abstracts (two pages, excluding references) in PDF format through EasyChair (RSA24).

Contributions will be reviewed for quality and relevance to the workshop’s theme. Theoretical and applied papers, as well as papers that capture best practices and lessons learned from field studies are encouraged. Submission of preliminary results would also be considered. Authors of accepted abstracts will present their work at the workshop either as regular talks or as posters. As the workshop organizers are planning a special issue on robot software architectures, authors will be invited to submit a full paper on their work.