Component specifications for robotics integration

Robotics researchers have been unable to capitalize easily on existing soft ware components to speed up their development efforts and maximize their sy stem's capabilities. A component-based approach for building the software f or robotics systems can provide reuse and sharing abilities to the research community. The software engineering community has been studying reuse tech niques for three decades. We present several results from those efforts tha t are applicable to the robotics software integration problem. We describe how to specify a software component so that a potential user may understand its capabilities and facilitate its application to his or her system. At t he National Institute of Standards and Technology, we have developed a thre e-stage, component-specification approach. We illustrate this approach for a component that is relevant to robotics.