TeMoto: A Software Framework for Adaptive and Dependable Robotic Autonomy With Dynamic Resource Management

Abstract

For widespread deployment of robots in challenging environments (fire fighting, search and rescue, planetary exploration, etc.), the software of the robot must allow for reliability and adaptability. For many existing systems, an unexpected change in mission specification, component failures, or energy conservation requires downtime for adaption (redesign of mission logic, switching sensor data processing pipeline, etc.). This is because software and hardware components for robotic applications are commonly chosen or designed based on task requirements and integrated either directly in the source code or via system configuration scripts, such as ROS launch files, leading to a fixed monolithic design. As the necessity and extent of adaptive behaviors is not always known prior to deployment, the structure of a robot’s software needs to support it by design. In this paper, we propose TeMoto, a novel architecture for adaptive autonomous robots, and a ROS-based framework of openly available software tools that implement the TeMoto architecture. TeMoto is a developer tool which combines dynamic (run-time) task and resource management, encourages modular and scalable system design and is task and platform agnostic - TeMoto provides the foundation for an adaptive robotic system. The feasibility of the TeMoto framework is qualitatively assessed via experiments on single and multi-robot setups spanning common scenarios (teleoperation, autonomous surveillance, cargo delivery, etc.). TeMoto-based systems exhibit increased fault tolerance and dynamic reconfigurability of software and hardware resources, as well as up to a 47% reduction in power consumption compared to the non TeMoto-enabled reference setup.