Mining the ROS ecosystem for Green Architectural Tactics in Robotics and an Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

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.