Design of service robots

According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), a service robot is a robot which operates semi or fully autonomously to perform services useful to the well being of human and equipment, excluding manufacturing operations [1]. These devices are typically complex systems requiring the input of knowledge from numerous disciplines. The authors have been using different software engineering techniques for the last 15 years, integrating new paradigms in the service robot development process as they emerged. This has made it possible to achieve rapid development of applications and subsequent maintenance. During the early years (1993?1998), our effortswere directed at the development of software for various kinds of teleoperated robots to performmaintenance tasks in nuclear power plants [2]; during a second phase (1999?2006),we built applications for ship-hull cleaning robots [3]. All this time, we have been applying all the possibilities of software engineering, from the use of paradigms for structured and object-based programming in early developments to the adoption of the current model-driven approach [model-driven engineering (MDE)] [4].