Project: "Real-time Robotics Analysis"

This website presents a Bachelor of Computer Science Honours Project conducted by Johannes Stickel at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (Monash University) in 2004. The project was supervised by Prof. Heinz Schmidt and Ian Peake

Project Overview

The goal of this project was to evaluate a specific technique for worst-case execution times predictions of distributed systems. This project focused on a simple remotely controlled mobile robot which is sold by Evolution Robotics, Inc..

The robot was modelled with a so-called architecture description language. Architecture description languages can be used to describe system architectures in a formal way. Such formal system descriptions can be used to analyse the properties of the system. In particular, some architecture description languages support the prediction non-functional system properties like reliability and worst-case execution time.

This project used the architecture description language RADL to create a formal model of the mobile robot solving mazes. This model was used to predict the time which is needed by the robot to solve a particular maze. Finally, the execution-time predictions and measurements of the real system were compared and deviations were analysed.