Modeling Requirements for Collaborative Robotic Services

Abstract

Collaborative robots have experienced low acceptance in applications, especially in industry. This fact has attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners, who point to different causes for this limited acceptance. One of the main reasons is the difficulty in converging on suitable methods for modeling collaborative interactions between robots and their surrounding context during the requirements phase. These interactions must be elicited and modeled during the requirements stage to maximize value creation through collaboration. Formal verification is necessary, taking into account the risks of human-robot interaction. However, such modeling is often absent in collaborative robot design, and choosing an appropriate approach remains an open problem. This paper addresses this problem using a model-based requirements cycle where the value creation is detached to provide direct analysis, possible optimization, and formal verification. The general process integrates with the general model-based requirements engineering of the remaining system. This service system approach relies on a goal-oriented requirements approach, and specific algorithms were developed to transfer goal-oriented diagrams into Petri Nets—to provide formal process verification. A case study illustrates the application of the proposed method on a collaborative robot used in a university hospital environment.

Keywords

• systems design
• requirements engineering
• collaborative robots
• human–robot interaction
• value co-creation