Supervision : Jacques MALENFANT

Abstractions for time and resource conscious composition in the context of distributed autonomous robotic systems

Space exploration, military, rescue robots; as autonomous robots target a larger spectrum of ever more involving missions, that require autonomy and coordination among various autonomous robots, control architectures become very complex software systems that intertwine high-level computation-intensive tasks such as planning and building maps, with lower-level ones, triggering responses on actuators from readings on sensors that have stringent real-time constraints. Yet, as in other areas of software development, the time-to-market forces the adoption of fast and efficient methodologies. Our goal is to propose a new component model adapted to autonomous robotics that tackles these issues. We want our model to allow programmers to explicitly express all of the synchronization, time-related and resource usage constraints on atomic computational elements in a declarative way, to abstract themselves away from low-level operational considerations, often known only at deployment-time. Such an approach requires a set of abstractions that capture all the aspects of a robotic architecture and that can be used to incrementally build complex architectures through composition, all the while respecting the individual constraints of the abstractions and the global constraints of the system. This thesis aims to provide solid foundations for the development of such abstractions, by defining the set of properties that capture the needs of the component in terms of time and resources and by showing how these properties can be used for the verification and construction of component assemblies that conform to the systems constraints.

2007-2011 Publications

• 2011
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “Interfaces riches pour des architectures de contrôle de robots compositionnelles”, Revue des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information - Série TSI : Technique et Science Informatiques, vol. 30 (6), pp. 711-739, (Lavoisier) (2011)
• 2010
  • O. Rogovchenko : “Abstractions for time and resource conscious composition in the context of distributed autonomous robotic systems”, thesis, phd defence 12/03/2010, supervision Malenfant, Jacques (2010)
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “Handling Hardware Heterogeneity through Rich Interfaces in a Component Model for Autonomous Robotics”, 2^nd International Conference on Simulation, Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots, SIMPAR 2010, vol. 6472, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Darmstadt, Germany, pp. 312-323, (Springer-Verlag) (2010)
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “Composition and Compositionality in a Component Model for Autonomous Robots”, Proceedings of Software Composition, SC 2010, vol. 6144, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Malaga, Spain, pp. 34-49, (Springer-Verlag) (2010)
• 2008
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “WS-Objects: First-class Objects as Web Service Parameters”, Third International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (ICIW 2008), Athènes, Greece, pp. 437-444, (IEEE) (2008)
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “Composants et composition pour les architectures de contrôle de robots”, Journal Européen des Systèmes Automatisés (JESA), vol. 42 (4), pp. 423-438, (Lavoisier) (2008)
• 2007
  • O. Rogovchenko, J. Malenfant : “Webjects, de vrais objets en paramètres des services web”, Langages et Modèles à Objets - LMO 2007, Revue des Sciences et Technologies (RSTI) série L'objet, Toulouse, France, pp. 65-80, (Hermes/Lavoisier) (2007)