Desire Web 2.0: Integration management and distributed software development for complex service robots

Current activities to improve the robot development process mostly focus on the technical aspects of robot development, including the fostering of robotic development frameworks, the integration of model driven engineering methods and tools of the assesment of best practice components and architectures. In contrast this article highlights aspects that are orthogonal to this technical point of view: the cooperation and project management aspects of robot development processes. Distributed development and testing on a common hardware platform require remote and anytime accessibility paired with a respective resource management, high operability of the robot including quality management and easy deployment of new software components. In the present article a web-based integration platform for distributed development and test is presented that aims at providing an integrated solution for these requirements. It was developed in the last phase of the DESIRE project due to the urgent need for a powerful tool that would reduce the immense integration efforts within the project. The results of the practical evaluation of the web portal are given in the last section of this article.