Second Workshop on Quality and Reliability Assessment of Robotic Software Architectures and Components
ICRA 2023 Workshop
June, 2nd, 2023, London, UK
The development of intelligent robotic systems, both at present and in the future, will require greatly strengthened capabilities across sensing, reasoning, information management, and acting. The innovations required in these fields will primarily rely on the development of enhanced software components, software connectivity, and software architectures. This need is further emphasized by the increasing adoption of modular, open-source, and open-data contributions both within the research community and across the industry, for example, the widespread use of open-source modular middleware such as ROS. Although many significant research contributions deal with the analysis of correctness, robustness, or reliability of algorithms and theoretical formulations of robotic capabilities, relatively few deals with design and analysis concerning the quality and reliability of the software that supports the execution of these capabilities. This workshop aims to bridge the gap between practical software engineering, program verification, and applicable robotics by bringing the topics of quality and reliability assessment of software to the fore. The workshop will achieve this through a combination of talks from invited speakers that have relevant contributions and projects, together with contributions from the research community to welcome the latest ideas and contributions relevant to this topic.
Selected Contributions
"Towards Resilient UAV Systems", Anamta Khan, Joao Campos, Naghmeh Ivaki and Henrique Madeira
"Enhancing the confidence of autonomous robotic missions. Application to an on-the-field bathymetric mission", Karen Godary-Déjean, Elbert Liebenherg, Adrien Hereau and Andrew Young
"A Practical Real-Time Distributed Software Framework for Mobile Robots", Douglas Bertol, Geoff Fink, Ylenia Nistico, Gianluca Cerilli, Marco Marchitto and Claudio Semini
"Distributed Software Architecture for Electro-Hydraulic Humanoid", Maysoon Ghandour, Anas Ammounah and Samer Alfayad
"Using scores from the model architecture for unknown object detection in autonomous driving: Preliminary results", Corentin Bunel, Maxime Gueriau, Samia Ainouz and Gilles Gasso
"ROSSMARie: A Domain-Specific Language To Express Dynamic Safety Rules and Recovery Strategies for Autonomous Robots", Momina Rizwan, Christoph Reichenbach and Volker Krueger
Programme
09:00 - 09:05 Welcome
09:05 - 10:30 Session 1 (chair: Michael Fisher)
Dejanira Araiza Illan, “Assessing quality and reliability of robotic software for industrial applications: challenges and solutions”
Ingo Lütkebohle, “Industrial practice on software quality assurance for mobile robots”
10:30 - 11:00 Poster spotlight
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 - 13:00 Session 2 (chair: Charles Lesire)
Nico Hochgeschwender, “Testing Service Robots in the Field: Challenges and Solutions”
Floris Erich, “Physical Integration Testing for DevOps in Robotics”
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:30 Session 3 (chair: Alcino Cunha)
Ivano Malavolta, “Conducting Experiments on the Software Architecture of Robotic Software”
Chris Timperley, “Lightweight Analysis and Specification for Better Modular Robotics Software”
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 - 16:30 Poster session
16:30 - 17:30 Panel discussion on “Open challenges in robotic software quality and reliability assessment”
17:30 - 17:45 Award and Closing
Invited Speakers
Conducting Experiments on the Software Architecture of Robotic Software
Today robotic systems are central to many industrial sectors, such as logistics, autonomous warehousing, and healthcare. If on one side ROS is helping roboticists by providing a standardized communication platform for robotic systems, on the other side ROSsystems are getting more and more large and complex, thus making it extremely difficult to ensure their level of quality, e.g., in terms of performance, security, energy efficiency, testability, maintainability. Improving the quality of robotic systems is not a new activity, but in this talk, we tackle it from a different perspective: we look at them from a software architecture perspective. In this talk, I will walk you through a series of experiments we conducted at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam targeting the architecture of ROS systems, we will discuss some architectural tactics for ROS systems, and will close with an overview of our open-source tool for automatically executing experiments on robotics software
Physical Integration Testing for DevOps in Robotics
In the past decade an understanding has arisen in general software engineering that the primary measure of success should be software being successfully used by its intended users. The DevOps movement in particular has highlighted a gap between transferring software systems from the development environment to the operations environment. Recently various researchers and practitioners in robotics have looked at DevOps as a missing part in the way robot applications are created. Robot software faces some specific issues which general software does not have, increasing the complexity of introducing a DevOps way of working. The biggest issue is the physicality of robotics, our machines operate in the real world and thus have real world consequences. To make it easier to test robotic systems in real environments, we have introduced a testing framework called ROSPIT, which allows specifying Physical Integration Tests using a high level XML syntax and graphical tools.
Industrial practice on software quality assurance for mobile robots
While robots are undoubtedly some of the most complex mechatronics devices currently built, industrial practice for creating them is not so different from other complex software products. However, it is very different from practice in academia, particularly when going to full-fledged consumer products (as opposed to the often custom-developed industrial automation systems). This talk will contribute an industrial perspective on the QA approaches taken during the journey of a prototype to a product, highlighting both "solved" and open challenges along the way.
Lightweight Analysis and Specification for Better Modular Robotics Software
Building robust and reliable robotic software is an inherently challenging feat that requires substantial expertise across a variety of disciplines. Despite that, writing robot software has never been easier thanks to software frameworks such as ROS: Colloquially known as the "Linux of Robotics", ROS drastically reduces the barrier to writing robotics software by facilitating extensive code reuse and collaborative development through its modular design and rich package ecosystem. At its best, ROS allows newcomers to assemble simple, autonomous robots within a matter of hours or days, and domain experts working in a particular area of robotics (e.g., vision) to share their latest algorithms with the community as a reusable software component. In practice, however, truly reusable ROS software components are difficult to build and even trickier to integrate; subtle bugs and misassumptions are easy to introduce and hard to detect. In this talk, I'll discuss how ROS developers build components and systems, the common mistakes that they make, and how lightweight specification and analysis tools can help to identify and prevent those mistakes.
Assessing quality and reliability of robotic software for industrial applications: challenges and solutions
The global supply chains face emerging and ever growing challenges across industries, highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic and diverse political events over the last couple of years. Supply chain disruption has become more dynamic, and the requirement for dealing with a high mix of products through many distribution channels has increased with the demand for mass customization. The need for agile and flexible robot solutions controlled by intricate software (e.g. Robot Operating System) with the latest artificial intelligence advancements, modular software architectures, easy to use interfaces and adaptability capabilities has become more apparent as means to drive business value and increase resiliency. As robots become smarter and take over more complex tasks, the challenges to ensure their safety, cybersecurity and reliability will increase. In this talk, we will take note of current and future technological trends in robotic software for supply chain applications, new and increasing challenges at assessing quality and reliability of robotic software solutions applied to manufacturing and logistics, and briefly reflect on possible ways to address such challenges through software engineering and verification and validation tools and techniques, to open room for thought and collaboration.
Testing Service Robots in the Field: Challenges and Solutions
Service robots operate in uncertain and dynamic environments. While being increasingly popular, engineering service robots remains challenging. Especially, evolving them from prototype to deployable product requires effective validation and verification, assuring the robot's correct and safe operation in the target environment. While testing is the most common validation and verification technique used in practice, surprisingly little is known about the actual testing practices and technologies used in the service robotics domain. In this talk I will present observations from an experience report on field testing of an industrial-strength service robot, as it transitions from lab experiments to an operational environment. I will report on challenges and possible solutions, and reflect on their effectiveness in identifying and testing safety-critical scenarios.
Organizers
Michael FISHER
Dept. of Computer Sciences, University of Manchester, UKhttps://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/michael.fisher.html
Charles LESIRE
ONERA/DTIS, University of Toulouse, Francehttps://sites.google.com/view/charles-lesire
Program Committee
Rafael Cardoso, Univ. of Aberdeen, UK
Nico Hochgeschwender, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University, Germany
Christophe Grand, ONERA/DTIS, Univ. of Toulouse, France
Ulrik Pagh Schultz, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Ronen Brafman, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Floris Erich, AIST, Japan
Francisco J. Rodriguez Lera, Univ. of Léon, Spain
Support
This workshop is supported by: