Conceptual Development of Crowd-Engineering Workflows for Service Robotics

In recent years, the effects of digital transformation have also influenced the development
strategy and -process of new products. Companies need to develop and market their
products more customer-oriented and rapidly in order to remain competitive in the global
marketplace. Especially robotics development is becoming more and more complex and
interconnected. Therefore, the developers have to work in interdisciplinary and mostly
globally distributed teams. However, many companies are increasingly using external
resources and opening their innovation processes to external collaborators in order to
increase their innovation potential and remain competitive by using open innovation
(OI) and co-creation (CC) technologies. Recently, this trend can also be observed in
service robotics development. Therefore, new methods to improve collaboration and
interaction are needed to ensure that globally distributed engineers and co-creators are
able to jointly develop innovative and user-friendly service robots. Nevertheless, there
is a lack of a continuous and distributed development process on digital development
environments for service robotics that enables the use of collaborative processes such
as CC and crowd-engineering (CE). Therefore the question arises, how the individual
workflows of distributed and networked users on a digital development area can be
supported? For this reason, the RoboPORT project aims to develop an open source
platform on which various actors can jointly develop and implement service robotics. The
complex processes on the platform require not only resources and data, but also that
these be coordinated and connected via workflows. In this thesis, the CE approaches
were analyzed in detail. Furthermore, workflows for a collaborative and distributed
development of service robotic prototypes were implemented. This thesis has analyzed
the CE approaches and designs workflows for distributed joint development of a digital
workspace on an open source platform for service robotics development.