System Synthesis Supplementary Data

Introduction

In order to explore the capability of automated system synthesis to compose a variety of novel systems from a common set of components, an experiment simulating the design of a mobile search and rescue robotic system is developed. As an automated system synthesis experiment, this experiment explores how an automated system can generate the structure of an design which can be implemented with a defined set of components available to satisfy the design; the components used in these designs are taken as an input into the system. Thus, this document describes the defined components used in this experiment, as well as how the experiments were organized and executed, with the system performance both in terms of computational requirements and resulting designs reported. The formulation of the system synthesis approach used in these experiments are described in work referencing this document.

This experiment defines a variety of common hardware and software components which may be useful for the implementation of the proposed robotic system in a variety of operating conditions. These components are based on describing components developed or used for real world components developed for a variety of previous robotics research projects. This experiment also defines a set of functional capabilities which may be included in the system, as well as a set of environmental parameters which may impact how such functionality must be implemented. These components include some components which provide similar functional capabilities with varying non-functional requirements (e.g. differing types of connection standards, differing computational resource budgets/requirements) in order to flesh out the design space such that trade-offs between selections exist.