Robotic technologies are continuously transforming the domestic and the industrial environments. Recently the Robotic Operating System (ROS), an open source middleware framework, has been widely adopted both by industry and academia, becoming the de facto standard for developing robot applications. Guaranteeing the correct behaviour of robotic systems is, however, challenging due to their potential for parameterization and heterogeneity. Although different approaches exist, focusing on concrete domain spaces for specific scenarios, no general approach to reason about ROS systems has yet arisen. This paper proposes an approach to model and verify ROS systems using real time properties, focusing on one of the main features of ROS, the communication between nodes. It takes low-level parameters into account, such as queue sizes and timeouts, and uses timed automata as the modelling language. The physical robot Kobuki is used as a complex case study, over which properties are automatically verified using the UPPAAL model checker, enabling the identification of problematic parameter combinations.
Robots are being increasingly used in safetycritical contexts, such as transportation and health. The need for flexible behavior in these contexts, due to human interaction factors or unstructured operating environments, led to a transition from hardware-to software-based safety mechanisms in robotic systems, whose reliability and quality is imperative to guarantee. Source code static analysis is a key component in formal software verification. It consists on inspecting code, often using automated tools, to determine a set of relevant properties that are known to influence the occurrence of defects in the final product. This paper presents HAROS, a generic, plug-in-driven, framework to evaluate code quality, through static analysis, in the context of the Robot Operating System (ROS), one of the most widely used robotic middleware. This tool (equipped with plug-ins for computing metrics and conformance to coding standards) was applied to several publicly available ROS repositories, whose results are also reported in the paper, thus providing a first overview of the internal quality of the software being developed in this community.
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