Open AccessBootstrapping MDE Development from ROS Manual Code
Author(s) -
Nadia Hammoudeh García
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international journal of robotic computing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2641-9521
DOI - 10.35708/rc1869-126256
Subject(s) - computer science , software engineering , software deployment , leverage (statistics) , software , correctness , executable , model driven architecture , software development , systems engineering , programming language , artificial intelligence , engineering
Ten years after its rst release, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is arguably the most popular software framework used to pro-gram robots. It achieved such status despite its shortcomings compared to alternatives similarly centered on manual programming and, perhapssurprisingly, to model-driven engineering (MDE) approaches. Based onour experience, we identied possible ways to leverage the accessibility ofROS and its large software ecosystem, while providing quality assurancemeasures through selected MDE techniques. After describing our visionon how to combine MDE and manually written code, we present therst technical contribution in this pursuit: a family of three metamodels to respectively model ROS nodes, communication interfaces, and sys-tems. Such metamodels can be used, through the accompanying Eclipse-based tooling made publicly available, to model ROS systems of arbitrary complexity and generate with correctness guarantees the software arti-facts for their composition and deployment. Furthermore, they account for specications on these aspects by the Object Management Group(OMG), in order to be amenable to hybrid systems coupling ROS andother frameworks. We also report on our experience with a large andcomplex corpus of ROS software including the shortcomings of standardROS tools and of previous eorts on ROS modeling.