A Systems Engineering Analysis of Robot Motion for Team Delft’s APC Winner 2016

In this chapter we take a systems engineering stand to perform a postmortem analysis of the design of the robot motion subsystem in Team Delft’s robot winner of the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016, understanding the benefits and limitations of the motion planning approach taken. We use an analysis framework based on Model-Based Systems Engineering with the ISE&PPOOA methodology, and a novel model of levels of robot automation. The functional approach of ISE&PPOOA helps us understand how the design decisions in the architecture of the solution impact the performance and quality attributes in capabilities required for the competition. The levels of robot automation help analyze the fundamental properties of the control schemas applied at different levels of the control architecture when handling uncertainty.