Modularity in Service Robotics

Versatile service robots are highly complicated systems. A breakthrough of a mobile service robot market requires substantial advancement in the standardization of the modules used in their structures. At the moment, extensive technical requirements lead to expensive tailor-made realisations, which in turn prevent generic solutions, and thus the advantages of mass production cannot be utilised. The implementation of modular design, both in software and in hardware, is needed if we want to get good results at reasonable costs. Also, we need to be able to standardise the interfaces between different modules and towards environment. The final goal is that different plug-and-play subsystems and modules, such as navigation or machine vision modules, will become commercially available for everybody. In that case, resources could be focused on developing real applications and the actual product development would become cheaper, easier and faster. The concept of modularity might just be the decisive step for a breakthrough in mobile robotics; currently, there simply are not enough resources available for every research group to develop everything by themselves.