Formal Specification of Robotic Architectures for Experimental Robotics

Robotic systems are becoming more safety critical systems as they are deployed in unstructured human-centered environments. These software intensive systems are composed of distributed, heterogeneous software components interacting in a highly dynamic, uncertain environment. However, no systematic software development process is followed in robotics research. This is a real barrier for system level performance analysis and reasoning, which are in turn required for scalable bench-marking methods and reusing existing software. This chapter provides an end-to-end overview on how robotic software systems can be formally specified from requirement modeling, through solution space exploration, and architecture modeling, and finally to generate executable code. The process is based on SafeRobots framework—a model-driven toolchain for designing software for robotics. Several domain-specific modeling languages that are developed as a part of this integrated approach are also discussed.