A software architecture supporting self-adaptation of wireless control networks

The programming of most robotic tasks is conceptually simple, but error recovery and the handling of unexpected events add enormous complexity to the programming burden. Furthermore, software is procedural, so the handling of scenarios unanticipated by the programmer is just not possible in most programs. The objective of this paper is to describe a software architecture for self-adaptive systems that guides systems engineers to conveniently build self-adaptive systems, reducing the workload necessary to program complex tasks. To this end, the ReFrESH self-adaptive framework is designed. The primary contributions of this work are: (1) illustrating the design philosophy of the layered architecture of ReFrESH; (2) demonstrating a module programming model to support self-adaptation in ReFrESH; (3) implementing a simplified task, “line-up-blocks”, which is comprehensible, yet has sufficient complexity to present the effectiveness of programming a fault tolerant task utilizing the ReFrESH framework.