Component-Based Robotic Engineering (Part II)

This article is the second of a two-part series intended as an introduction to component-based software engineering (CBSE) in robotics. In Part I, we regarded a component as a piece of software that implements robotic functionality. The focus was on the design principles and implementation guidelines that enable the development of reusable and maintainable software building blocks. In Part II, we discuss the role of software components as architectural units of large, possibly distributed, software-intensive robotic systems. The focus is on technologies to manage the heterogeneity of hardware, computational, and communication resources and on design techniques to assemble components into systems.