Design and Development of a Reusable Component-based Architecture for Surgical Robotics

Robotics is a growing field that is reaching a wide variety of application areas. The employment of robots for the implementation of a task is not anymore a prerogative of certain branches of the industry. In fact, more and more frequently robots are utilized to support humans during the execution of an assignment and this requires a flexible system, able to adapt to the environment. Moreover, given the number of contexts in which robots are used, there is an increasing need for modular and reusable tools for the description of tasks. The robotic applications considered in this work are mainly related to robotic surgery, since minimally invasive surgery is a challenging field in which the employment of robots has enabled significant improvements in terms of quality of the procedures. This study provides a set of patterns aimed to the design and the development of a component-based software architecture for the description of a complex robotic task. The best practices illustrated in this work are built on the concept of separation of concerns and have been defined to promote the creation of a reusable framework of components for the robotics. The proposed patterns are first introduced and then applied to different case studies to demonstrate their adaptability to describe a complex robotics task in different application domains.