BRICS - Best practice in robotics

TLDR

Robot development has traditionally resembled artwork or ingenious engineering rather than a structured, formalized process. BRICS aims to structure and formalize robot development, providing tools, models, and libraries to dramatically reduce development time. BRICS collaborates with academic and industrial robotics component providers to identify best practices, refactor components for higher reusability and robustness, and supports development with a structured tool chain and code repository. Initial results include analyzing existing development processes, harmonizing robot control interfaces and component models, and setting up robot systems for best‑practice analyses. BRICS is a joint research project funded by the European Commission ICT Challenge 2 (grant 231940).

Abstract

In the past, the process of developing a new robot application has had more of the design of a piece of artwork or of an act of ingenious engineering than of a structured and formalized process. The prime objective of BRICS is to structure and formalize the robot development process itself and to provide tools, models, and functional libraries, which allow reducing the development time by a magnitude. BRICS is working together with academic as well as industrial providers of robotics “components” (hardware and software), to identify and document best practices in the development of complex robotics systems, to refactor (together) the existing components in order to achieve a much higher level of reusability and robustness, and to support the robot development process with a structured tool chain and code repository. BRICS is a joint research project funded by the European Commission ICT Challenge 2 under grant number 231940. First results include the analysis of existing robot development processes, the first steps towards harmonizing robot con- control interfaces and component models and the set-up of robot systems for best practice analyses.