Abstract: This paper presents a framework for engineering resource-adaptive software targeted at small mobile devices. Rather than building a solution from scratch, we extend and integrate existing work on software infrastructures for ubiquitous computing, and on resource-adaptive applications. This paper addresses two research questions: first, is it feasibility to coordinate resource allocation and adaptation policies among several applications in a way that is both effective and efficient. And second, can end-users understand and control such adaptive behaviors dynamically, depending on user-defined goals for each activity. The evaluation covered both the systems and the usability perspectives, the latter by means of a user study. The contributions of this work are: first, a set of design guidelines, including APIs for integrating new applications; second, a concrete infrastructure that implements the guidelines. And third, a way to model quality of service tradeoffs based on utility theory, which our research indicates end-users with diverse backgrounds are able to leverage for guiding the adaptive behaviors towards activity-specific quality goals.

Abstract: Component-based architectures in robotics, like the Robot Operating System (ROS), simplify system development by integrating reusable, off-the-shelf components. However, these components often lack sufficient documentation on their use and the architectures they form, leading to architectural misconfigurations. General-purpose Architectural Description Languages (ADLs) effectively provide properties to detect misconfigurations but are burdensome to use, as they require mapping new language-specific concepts to the ROS domain. This work introduces rospec, a novel ADL embedding ROS-specific knowledge to help developers specify and detect architectural misconfigurations. By mapping the language's syntax with ROS concepts, we argue that practitioners can more easily understand and reason about specifications written in the language. We provide an example and compare it with a general-purpose ADL.