A Framework for Quality Assessment of ROS Applications

9/28/2016

By André Santos, HASLab, INESC TEC & University of Minho.

Abstract. Robots are being increasingly used in safety-critical con- texts, 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 presentation is about 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, thus providing a first overview of the internal quality of the software being developed in this community.

Keywords. Software Engineering; robotics, software quality, coding standards, software metrics.

About the speaker. André Santos is currently a MAP-I PhD candidate and researcher at HASLab, INESC TEC & University of Minho. He holds an MSc degree in Informatics Engineering from the University of Minho. His MSc thesis, named Applying Coding Standards to the Robot Operating System, focused on software quality, namely on studying various coding standards and how they can be applied in robotics software. André is currently focusing on exploring how robotics software can be further improved in terms of quality and safety. His research interests lie in formal methods and ways to measure software quality. More concretely, he enjoys working on tools for software analysis and development. His first notable work was on the PROVA project, by Educed, in which he developed an editor for graphical models of software requirements. More recently, André improved this tool which lead to the acceptance of a paper at IROS’16 conference, that will be presented in this talk.