Herman Bruyninckx
(KU Leuven, Belgium; TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Flanders Make, Belgium)
This is the landing page of an online book to help developers of robotics (and other cyber-physical) systems design composable components for compositional, adaptive, and explainable systems-of-systems. In other words, the book explains the complexity behind making systems that can interpret the situation they are in, and select the right set of actions to realise their task in those environmental conditions. The focus is not (yet) on providing solutions, but on identifying necessary design patterns, together with possible best practices, to tackle the enormous complexity of such systems. The basis of the approach is to model, in various degrees of formalization, the knowledge one has about the robot, the task, the situations, and the resources available to the robot. The software aspects selects from experiences “that work”, in holonic architectures and in “the Web”.
Status: the book is work in progress, roughly 50% finished, and its contents still change weekly.
Origin and future: this book started as a Deliverable of the H2020 project RobMoSys (2017–2020). It reflects on an almost daily basis the evolution in our understanding and formalization of how to design and implement the most complex possible robotic applications. The mature and consolidated parts of the book will eventually be integrated in the public Wiki of the project.
The RobMoSys activities around model-driven engineering for robotics (and hopefully also its brand name) are expected to live on, beyond the life time of the funded project. Preferably under the auspices of international robotics organisations (e.g., euRobotics, Digital Innovation Hubs,…), as the community-driven eco-system around model-driven engineering in robotics.
The book's source files are in LaTeX and SVG, and will be made available (as soon as we find an appropriate vendor-independent hosting) under the following Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) copyright licenses:
1. Open Definition of the Open Knowledge Foundation:
and
2. Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) of the Creative Commons organization:
The pragmatic expectation of the main author about the interpretation of the terms “to preserve provenance” and “to give appropriate credit” is that:
We are looking for collaborations to bring the book from its LaTeX and PDF legacy to a fully Web 3.0 version. Starting with a rich HTML5 document basis, not unlike web-native documents as this JSON-LD specification or, even better, like this online and cooperatively editable dokieli example. These approaches fulfill much better the society's expectations about available, accessible, concentrated, and peer-reviewed state of the art documents than the reining commercially driven publication culture of fragmented least publishable unit papers.
Acknowledgements
The main author acknowledges the support from various public funding sources, that allowed him to let the ideas in the book develop of more than three decades: KU Leuven (amply funded by the Flemish Government), Flanders Make (the strategic research centre for the manufacturing industry in Flanders), from the European Union's FP7 and H2020 Programmes, via the projects RobMoSys, Brics, Ocean, RoboHow, Rosetta, ROPOD, PicknPack, Sherpa, Esrocos, IMBALS.