P.: Component-based Robotic Engineering. Part I: Reusable building blocks

his article is the first of a two-part series intended as an introduction to component-based software en-gineering (CBSE) in robotics. In this tutorial, we regard a component as a piece of software that implements robotic functionality (e.g., path plan-ning). The focus of this article is on design principles and implementation guidelines that enable the development of reusable and maintainable software-building blocks, which can be assembled to build robotic applications. Software for autonomous robotics systems is typically em-bedded, concurrent, real-time, distributed, and data-intensive and must guarantee system properties such as safety, reliability, and fault tolerance. Software requirements of robotic control applications are similar (to a large extent) to those of software systems in othe