  The multidisciplinarity of robotics creates a need for robust integration
methodologies that can facilitate the adoption of state-of-the-art research
components in an industrial application. Unfortunately, there are no clear,
community accepted guidelines or standards that define the integration of such
components in a single robotic system. In this paper, we propose a methodology
that assesses the software components of a candidate system on the basis of the
effort required to integrate them and the impact their integration will have on
a target system. We demonstrate how this methodology can be applied using an
industrial tool packing system as an example. The system integrates a wide
range of both in-house and third-party research outputs and software
components. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating system
performance with an experimental benchmark that assesses the robustness,
reliability and operational speed of the system for the given packing task. We
also demonstrate how our methodology can be used to predict the amount of
integration time required for a component. The proposed integration methodology
can be applied to any robotic system to facilitate its transition from the
research to an industrial environment.
