In software engineering, energy awareness refers to the conscious design and development of software that is able to monitor and react to energy state. Energy awareness is the key building block for energy efficiency and for other quality aspects of robotics software, such as mission completion time and safety. However, as of today, there is no guidance for practitioners and researchers on how to architect robotics software with energy awareness in mind. The goal of this paper is to identify architectural tactics for energy-aware robotics software. Specifically, using a dataset of 339493 data points extracted from five complementary data sources (e.g., source code repositories, Stack Overflow), we identified and analyzed 97 data points that considered both energy consumption and architectural concerns. We then synthesized a set of energy-aware architectural tactics via thematic analysis. In this preliminary investigation we focus on two representative architectural tactics.

Robots are becoming more and more commonplace in many industry settings. This successful adoption can be partly attributed to (1) their increasingly affordable cost and (2) the possibility of developing intelligent, software-driven robots. Unfortunately, robotics software consumes significant amounts of energy. Moreover, robots are often battery-driven, meaning that even a small energy improvement can help reduce its energy footprint and increase its autonomy and user experience.In this paper, we study the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem, the de-facto standard for developing and prototyping robotics software. We analyze 527 energy-related data points (including commits, pull-requests and issues on ROS-related repositories, ROS-related questions on StackOverflow, ROS Discourse, ROS Answers and the official ROS Wiki).Our results include a quantification of the interest of roboticists on software energy efficiency, 10 recurrent causes and 14 solutions of energy-related issues, and their implied trade-offs with respect to other quality attributes. Those contributions support roboticists and researchers towards having energy-efficient software in future robotics projects.

In today's world, reducing energy consumption should be the goal for any organization and any system, including robotics software systems. However, state of the practice in robotics software development focuses primarily on achieving functionality and performance, with minimal recognition of energy-efficiency as a driving software quality. The goal of this paper is to identify, synthesize, and empirically evaluate architectural tactics for energy-efficiency applied by practitioners in real robotics projects. Four tactics were identified by mining software repository techniques applied to the ROS ecosystem. The tactics were evaluated via experimentation on a real, commodity robotics system. Results show that the application of green architectural tactics tends to largely improve the energy-efficiency of the robot (7.9% energy savings when all tactics are applied) and that the movement strategy and the physical environment where the robot operates strongly influence how energy is consumed by the robot.