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In today's world, reducing energy consumption should be the goal for any organization and any system, including robotics software systems. However, state of the practice in robotics software development focuses primarily on achieving functionality and performance, with minimal recognition of energy-efficiency as a driving software quality. The goal of this paper is to identify, synthesize, and empirically evaluate architectural tactics for energy-efficiency applied by practitioners in real robotics projects. Four tactics were identified by mining software repository techniques applied to the ROS ecosystem. The tactics were evaluated via experimentation on a real, commodity robotics system. Results show that the application of green architectural tactics tends to largely improve the energy-efficiency of the robot (7.9% energy savings when all tactics are applied) and that the movement strategy and the physical environment where the robot operates strongly influence how energy is consumed by the robot.

Software is becoming the core aspect in robotics development and it is growing in terms of complexity and size. However, roboticists and researchers are struggling in ensuring and even measuring the quality of their software with respect to run-time properties such as energy efficiency and performance. This paper presents Robot Runner, a tool for streamlining the execution of measurement-based experiments involving robotics software. The tool is able to automatically setup, start, resume, and fully replicate user-defined experiments. Thanks to its plugin-based architecture, the tool is fully independent of the number, type, and complexity of the used robots (both real and simulated). GitHub repository - https://github.com/S2-group/robot-runner Youtube video - https://youtu.be/le-SAXI2k1.

Nowadays, robots are widely used in many areas of our lifes, such as autonomous storage, self-driving vehicles, drones, industrial automation, etc. Energy is a critical factor for robotic systems, especially for mobile robots where energy is a finite resource (e.g., surveillance autonomous rovers). Since software is becoming the central focus of modern robotic systems, it is important to understand how it influences the energy consumption of the entire system. However, there is no systematic study of the state of the art in energy efficiency of robotics software that could guide research or practitioners in finding solutions and tools to develop robotic systems with energy efficiency in mind the goal of this paper is to present a review of existing research on energy efficiency in robotics software. Specifically, we investigate on (i) the used metrics for energy efficiency, (ii) the application domains within the robotics area covered by research on energy efficiency, (iii) the identified major energy consumers within a robotic system, (iv) how existing approaches are evaluated, (v) the used energy models, (vi) the techniques supporting the development of energy-efficient robotics software, and (vii) which quality attributes tend to be traded off when dealing with energy efficiency in robotics. We also provide a replication package to assess, extend, and/or replicate the study the results of this work can guide researchers and practitioners in robotics and software engineering in better reasoning and contributing to energy-efficient robotics software.