Decreasing the Design Complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems through Conceptual Modeling: The Robot Abstraction Method

The increasing complexity of designing, deploying, and maintaining Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), particularly those incorporating multiple interacting robots, presents significant challenges regarding programming and system integration. Existing methods and tools that aim to decrease the complexity of setting up such systems through modeling-based approaches often focus on single-robot interaction and rely on manual data entries, thus limiting their scalability and applicability to more intricate multi-robot environments. This contribution introduces the Robot ion Method (RobAM), a conceptual modeling method developed to decrease the design complexity of CPS through additional layers of abstraction. By utilizing conceptual modeling, capabilities of humanoid robots can be leveraged for the design of multi-robot interactions. Thereby, our approach enhances the modeling of complex CPS as well as the subsequent generation of code to enable efficient deployments. Through an experimental scenario, we demonstrate how RobAM simplifies the development process of CPS, paving the way for advancements regarding the integration of AI-supported technologies, such as Large Language Models, to ultimately generate contextually relevant semantics for future system design.