Benefits of the MDE approach for the development of embedded and robotic system

 

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) raises the level of abstraction of the development life cycle by shifting its emphasis from code to models and model transformations. According to the well-known principle of separation of concerns, MDE advocates the isolation of business concerns from their technical achievement. The idea is that the business concerns can be modelled independently from any platform concerns. Therefore, business models are not corrupted by technical concerns. In this way, the main part of the development becomes an activity upstream, dedicated to business concerns through the elaboration of the application model that abstracts away technical details, i.e., the so-called Platform-Independent Model (PIM). The transformation of a PIM into a Platform-Specific Model (PSM) is then achieved when introducing into the PIM the technical considerations depending on the chosen middleware. We applied MDE to develop applications for Aibo which is one of several types of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony. The objectives was (1) to analyse advantages provided by models in this specific robotic context, (2) to measure the maturity of MDE provided technologies and (3) to highlight the limitations of the approach . We present in this paper the approach we follow for applying MDE for Aibo and we present the results we obtained.