A skill provides access to functionalities realized by components for robotics behavior development. Skills lift the level of abstraction from functional and service to a skill abstraction level, being usable from a task abstraction level for robotics behavior development.

Skill definitions define the interface of skills on Composition Tier 2. Skills are realized at Composition Tier 3 next to the component providing the required functionality, following a skill definition. Separating skill definitions and skill realizations enables the replacement and the composition of components (providing the same skill) and decouples the component from the behavior developer and the technology used to realize robotics behavior development. Skill definitions and skills are grouped in sets to model their semantic cohesion.

The domain-specific skill definitions at Composition Tier 2 ensure that different components with all their specifics present their capabilities in the same way. In consequence, skills belonging to the same domain represent the same capability when they use the same name and their input / output arguments as well as their result values follow the same domain-specific vocabulary and meaning.

A skill definition as the interface of a skill contains input and output attributes of a primitive type (int, bool , etc.) and return a result (SkillResult). The sum of all contained SkillResults models the possible results a skill could evaluate to. Each SkillResult maps to either SUCCESS or ERROR and contains an additional value to provide further result details (e.g. ERROR and “Path Blocked” for a moveto Skill).

• Separation of Levels and Separation of Concerns
• Skill Realization Metamodel
• Component-Definition Metamodel
• Behavior Developer
• Component Supplier

This document contains material from:

• Lotz2018 Alex Lotz, "Managing Non-Functional Communication Aspects in the Entire Life-Cycle of a Component-Based Robotic Software System", Dissertation, Technische Universität München, München 2018.
• Lutz2017 Matthias Lutz, “Model-Driven Behavior Development for Service Robotic Systems: Bridging the Gap between Software- and Behavior-Models,” 2017. (unpublished work)
• Stampfer2018 Dennis Stampfer, "Contributions to System Composition using a System Design Process driven by Service Definitions for Service Robotics". Dissertation, Technische Universität München, München, Germany, 2018.