Many companies have a high demand for flexible and economical automation solutions. As the development of such is time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge this usually demands significant investments. The more or less isolated development also prevents sharing and reuse of applications. Due to this, using robot-based automation solutions is often not sensible for medium-sized companies. In order to enable a wider use of robot-based automation solutions in medium-sized companies, we present a common repository of robotics applications to facilitate their reuse. The repository provides a way to find the application one needs, for example based on the requirements of a specific use case and a given situation. The goal of our work is to develop a semantic AppStore with robotic applications (apps) that not only contains a catalog of robotic apps, but also comprises their semantic descriptions and provides semantic search for apps based on their capabilities and properties. This semantic repository of robotic apps is developed in the scope of the ReApp project [3], hence its name ReApp Store. The ReApp Store is implemented based on real-world requirements of the end-user partners of the project consortium with the purpose to offer real-world apps from the domain of robotics.
The software taxonomy consists of a hierarchy of software capabilities as well as of algorithms that can be used
to implement them. It is based on the sensing, planning and acting paradigm [
The hardware taxonomy contains classification schemes for different hardware types such as sensors, output formats generated by hardware components, and applications scenarios a component can be used in, e.g. hazardous area protection. In the ReApp Store, it is used to relate apps with the hardware components they can access.
Moreover, the hardware and software taxonomies contain axioms that allow for the computation of capabilities that hardware components and apps exhibit. This enables a reasoner to infer the capabilities needed, e.g. for building a Pick&Place application, or to retrieve a list of components that satisfy a specific capability requirement.
In order to present the real-world deployment of the ReApp Store, we will present a use case of a Pick&Place skill application as it is widely used in industrial packaging applications (Fig. 2). It acts as a server for the action of picking and placing an object for other applications that may use it. It uses a laser scanner and a robot arm with a gripper as hardware components. We will show how the Pick&Place skill, as well as its composite applications, are represented in the ReApp Store, together with different types of semantic search for the apps, such as searching for applications compatible with the individual components of a composed app, and searching for apps with specific capabilities. The use case presentation will highlight how a fitting software component can be found by satisfying the requirements of the application without specific domain knowledge.