Rocon Authoring/Cento

= Social ADE (Authoring Development Environment) =

As we have mentioned elsewhere, we have and are very interested in providing solutions that can deliver services. A problem that has recurred quite frequently for us is team management. For a single robot that is hard enough - getting hardware, control, software all talking and working on the same wavelength is hard enough. And then you go multi-robot-device-android-web, the situation explodes and you really need roles from a wide variety of people. If you're developing a stock standard solution (e.g. khiva systems), this is not too much of an issue, but if you're interested in delivering a variety of services, often customised, then you typically have a single person dedicated to managing how the service should shape up, as well as the input-output from all those teams who are often not even locally available.

This individual is at the hub of what is required to author services and provide a solution. Since we tend to do alot of this, we would like to selfishly make this individual's job easier:

Work Socially

Think social coding as promoted by github. We need to find ways to automate submission of specifications and results, share issues and ideas across teams and centralise information and status into one very well painted, big picture.

The Service Authoring Pipeline

There is a definite flow of work when it comes to authoring a service. The customer's idea begets a formal representation (usually diagrammatic, e.g. BPML), which begets composition that finally configured and embedded for a real world solution. Since we may have a non-deterministic, very interruptable system (typical multi-agent scenario), then it becomes very important to close the loop and be able to provide monitoring, validation and testing of the implementation. By focusing on services, we hope to make this as practical as possible.