Runtime Verification and Field Testing for ROS-Based Robotic Systems

Robotic systems are becoming pervasive and adopted in increasingly many domains, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and space exploration. To this end, engineering software has emerged as a crucial discipline for building maintainable and reusable robotic systems. Robotics software engineering research has received increasing attention, fostering autonomy as a fundamental goal. However, robotics developers are still challenged trying to achieve this goal given that simulation is not able to deliver solutions to realistically emulate real-world phenomena. Robots also need to operate in unpredictable and uncontrollable environments, which require safe and trustworthy self-adaptation capabilities implemented in software. Typical techniques to address the challenges are runtime verification, field-based testing, and mitigation techniques that enable fail-safe solutions. However, there is no clear guidance to architect ROS-based systems to enable and facilitate runtime verification and field-based testing. This paper aims to fill in this gap by providing guidelines that can help developers and QA teams when developing, verifying or testing their robots in the field. These guidelines are carefully tailored to address the challenges and requirements of testing robotics systems in real-world scenarios. We conducted a literature review on studies addressing runtime verification and field-based testing for robotic systems, mined ROS-based application repositories, and validated the applicability, clarity, and usefulness via two questionnaires with 55 answers. We contribute 20 guidelines formulated for researchers and practitioners in robotic software engineering. Finally, we map our guidelines to open challenges thus far in runtime verification and field-based testing for ROS-based systems and, we outline promising research directions in the field.