• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.36 no.1
• /
• pp.21-29
• /
• 2009

An intelligent service robot is a robot that monitors its surroundings, and then provides a service to meet a user's goal. It is normally impossible for a robot to anticipate all the needs of its user and various situations in the surroundings ahead, and to prepare for all the necessary functions to cope with them. Therefore, it is required to support the self-growing capability by which robots can extend their functionality based on users' needs and external conditions. In this paper, as an enabler of the self-growing capability, we propose a method that allows a robot to select a component-composition pattern represented in an architectural form (called a sub-architecture), and to extend its functionality by obtaining a set of software components that are prescribed in the pattern. Sub-architecture is selected and instantiated not only based on the functionality required but also based on quality requirements of a user and the surrounding environment. To provide this method, we constructed a quality-attributes-in-use ontology and developed a brokering mechanism that matches quality requirements of users and surroundings against quality attributes of sub-architectures. The ontology provides the common vocabularies to represent quality requirements and attributes, and enables the semantically-based reasoning in matching and instantiating appropriate sub-architectures in supporting services to users. This ontology-based approach contributes to provide a great flexibility in extending robot functionality based on available software components, and to narrow the gap between users' Quality requirements and the Quality of the actual services provided by a robot.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.34 no.8
• /
• pp.731-742
• /
• 2007

Self-growing software is a software system that has the capability of evolving its functionalities and configurations by itself based on dynamically monitored situations. Self-growing software is especially necessary for intelligent service robots, which must have the capability to monitor their surrounding environments and provide appropriate behaviors for human users. However, it is hard to anticipate all situations that robots face with, and it is hard to make robots have all functionalities for various environments. In addition, robots have limited internal capacity. To support self-growing software for intelligent service robots, we are developing a cell-based distributed repository system that allows robots and developers transparently to share robot functionalities. To accomplish the creation of evolutionary repositories, we invented the concept of a cell, which is a logical group of distributed repositories based upon the functionalities of components. In addition, a cell can be used as a unit for the evolutionary growth of the components within the repositories. In this paper, we describe the requirements and architecture of the cell-based repository system for self-growing software. We also present a prototype implementation and experiment of the repository system. Through the cell-based repositories, we achieve improved performance of self-growing actions for robots and efficient sharing of components among robots and developers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
• /
• 2006.06c
• /
• pp.235-237
• /
• 2006

로봇 소프트웨어와 같이 사용자의 요구사항과 주변 환경의 잦은 변화에 직면하는 소프트웨어는 스스로 문제 상황을 판단하고, 동적으로 문제 상황을 극복할 수 있는 기능을 검색하고 이용할 수 있어야 한다. 이를 위해 본 논문에서는 아키텍처 기반의 로봇 소프트웨어 환경하에서 온톨로지를 이용하여 로봇의 문제 상황 극복을 위한 소프트웨어의 아키텍처를 재구성 전략과 컴포넌트를 모델링하고 이를 이용하여 문제 상황을 해결 할 수 있도록 적합한 컴포넌트를 선택하는 메커니즘을 기술한다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
• /
• 2005.11b
• /
• pp.322-324
• /
• 2005

자가성장 소프트웨어란 동적인 상황 판단에 의거하여 스스로 자신의 기능과 컴포넌트 구성 능력을 성장시키는 소프트웨어를 말한다. 자가성장 소프트웨어는 자신의 환경을 모니터링 하여 사용자에게 적절한 행동을 제공하여 주는 지능형 로봇에 특히 필요하다. 지능형 로봇은 현재 자신이 가지고 있는 소프트웨어로는 해결할 수 없는 상황에 부딪힐 수 있고 이러한 경우 동적으로 소프트웨어 컴포넌트를 획득하여 이용하게 해주는 것이 자가성장 로봇 소프트웨어의 역할이다. 효율적인 컴포넌트의 획득과 관리를 위해 컴포넌트 저장소의 중요성이 부각되고, 자가성장 로봇 소프트웨어를 실현하기 위한 저장소 프레임워크를 ICU의 SemBots 프로젝트에서 개발 중에 있다. 본 논문에서는 저장소를 위한 요구조건과 구조를 기술하고 저장소 시스템을 위한 프로토타입을 제시한다.