Software Product Lines for Industrial Robots: A Pilot Case with Arduino

Software reuse approaches in industrial robots are little exploited by industry, which often leads programmers to continue coding the same solutions, wasting time, effort, and cost. This paper describes the construction of a Software Product Line (SPL) to determine the feasibility of this approach as a reuse strategy for industrial robots. For the definition of the SPL, we followed the fundamental activities of domain engineering and application engineering. In addition, we identified its limitations and possible future work. As a result, it was got that the SPL approach is viable because a derivation of a product was made from the SPL applying some software reuse metrics, where it was found that 33% of the code needed for the operation of the robot was generated by the proposal, which represents a potential improvement in the time that developers take to program industrial robotics solutions with Arduino. In addition, it identified the potential of this approach in solutions to support the elderly in their homes and care centers, as well as some limitations related to the SPL and the domains involved.