A Methodology for Approaching the Integration of Complex Robotics Systems Illustrated through a Bi-manual Manipulation Case-Study

The multidisciplinarity of robotics creates a need for robust integration methodologies that can facilitate the adoption of state-of-the-art research components in an industrial application. Unfortunately, there are no clear, community accepted guidelines or standards that define the integration of such components in a single robotic system. In this paper, we propose a methodology that assesses the software components of a candidate system on the basis of the effort required to integrate them and the impact their integration will have on a target system. We demonstrate how this methodology can be applied using an industrial tool packing system as an example. The system integrates a wide range of both in-house and third-party research outputs and software components. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating system performance with an experimental benchmark that assesses the robustness, reliability and operational speed of the system for the given packing task. We also demonstrate how our methodology can be used to predict the amount of integration time required for a component. The proposed integration methodology can be applied to any robotic system to facilitate its transition from the research to an industrial environment.