Context: Robotics software architecture-based self-adaptive systems (RSASSs) are robotics systems made robust to runtime uncertainty by adapting their software architectures. The research landscape of RSASS approaches is multidisciplinary and fragmented, with many aspects still unexplored or ineffectively shared among communities involved. Objective: We aim at identifying, classifying, and analyzing the state of the art of existing approaches for RSASSs from the following perspectives: (i) the key characteristics of approaches and (ii) the evaluation strategies applied by researchers. Method: We apply the systematic mapping research method. We selected 37 primary studies via automatic, manual, and snowballing-based search and selection procedures. We rigorously defined and applied a classification framework composed of 32 parameters and synthesize the obtained data to produce a comprehensive overview of the state of the art. Results: This work contributes (i) a rigorously defined classification framework for studies on RSASSs, (ii) a systematic map of the research efforts on RSASSs, (iii) a discussion of emerging findings and implications for future research, and (iv) a publicly available replication package. Conclusion: This study provides a solid evidence-based overview of the state of the art in RSASS approaches. Its results can benefit RSASS researchers at different levels of seniority and involvement in RSASS research. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board .

Once deployed in the real world, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are out of reach for human supervision yet need to take decisions to adapt to unstable and unpredictable environments. To facilitate research on self-adaptive AUVs, this paper presents SUAVE, an exemplar for two-layered system-level adaptation of AUVs, which clearly separates the application and self-adaptation concerns. The exemplar focuses on a mission for underwater pipeline inspection by a single AUV, implemented as a ROS 2-based system. This mission must be completed while simultaneously accounting for uncertainties such as thruster failures and unfavorable environmental conditions. The paper discusses how SUAVE can be used with different self-adaptation frameworks, illustrated by an experiment using the Metacontrol framework to compare AUV behavior with and without self-adaptation. The experiment shows that the use of Metacontrol to adapt the AUV during its mission improves its performance when measured by the overall time taken to complete the mission or the length of the inspected pipeline.

In this article, we propose a hybrid combination of active inference and behavior trees (BTs) for reactive action planning and execution in dynamic environments, showing how robotic tasks can be formulated as a free-energy minimization problem. The proposed approach allows handling partially observable initial states and improves the robustness of classical BTs against unexpected contingencies while at the same time reducing the number of nodes in a tree. In this work, we specify the nominal behavior offline, through BTs. However, in contrast to previous approaches, we introduce a new type of leaf node to specify the desired state to be achieved rather than an action to execute. The decision of which action to execute to reach the desired state is performed online through active inference. This results in continual online planning and hierarchical deliberation. By doing so, an agent can follow a predefined offline plan while still keeping the ability to locally adapt and take autonomous decisions at runtime, respecting safety constraints. We provide proof of convergence and robustness analysis, and we validate our method in two different mobile manipulators performing similar tasks, both in a simulated and real retail environment. The results showed improved runtime adaptability with a fraction of the hand-coded nodes compared to classical BTs.

This paper describes Team Delft's robot winning the Amazon Robotics Challenge 2016. The competition involves automating pick and place operations in semistructured environments, specifically the shelves in an Amazon warehouse. Team Delft's entry demonstrated that the current robot technology can already address most of the challenges in product handling: object recognition, grasping, motion, or task planning; under broad yet bounded conditions. The system combines an industrial robot arm, 3-D cameras and a custom gripper. The robot's software is based on the robot operating system to implement solutions based on deep learning and other state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques, and to integrate them with off-the-shelf components. From the experience developing the robotic system, it was concluded that: 1) the specific task conditions should guide the selection of the solution for each capability required; 2) understanding the characteristics of the individual solutions and the assumptions they embed is critical to integrate a performing system from them; and 3) this characterization can be based on “levels of robot automation.” This paper proposes automation levels based on the usage of information at design or runtime to drive the robot's behavior, and uses them to discuss Team Delft's design solution and the lessons learned from this robot development experience.