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Publication details

Document type
Conference papers

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
Is it a Bug? Understanding Physical Unit Mismatches in Robot Software

Participants in the publication
Paulo Canelas (Author)
Dep. Informática
 Unidade de I&D e Inovação
 LASIGE
 Trenton Tabor (Author)
John-Paul Ore (Author)
Alcides Fonseca (Author)
Dep. Informática
 LASIGE
 Claire Le Goues (Author)
Christopher S. Timperley (Author)

Summary
Robot software is abundant with variables that represent real-world physical units (eg, meters, seconds). Operations over different units (eg, adding meters and seconds) may be incorrect and can lead to dangerous system misbehaviors; manually detecting such mistakes is challenging. Current software analysis techniques identify such mismatches using dimensional analysis rules and ROS-specific assumptions to analyze the source code. However, these are ignorant of the fact that physical unit mismatches in robotics code are often intentional (eg, when operating a differential drive robot), resulting in false positive bug reports that can impede robotics developer trust and productivity. In this work, we study how developers introduce physical unit mismatches by manually inspecting 180 errors detected by the software analysis technique, Phys. We identify three types of physical unit mismatches and present a taxonomy of eight high-level categories of how these errors manifest. We find that developers often make unforced and paradigmatic physical unit mismatches through differential drives, small angle approximations, and controls. We draw insights on current development to inform future research to better detect, categorize, and address meaningful physical unit mismatches.

Date of Submisson/Request
2023-09-15
Date of Acceptance
2024-01-15
Date of Publication
2024-05-13

Institution
FACULDADE DE CIÊNCIAS DA UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA

Event
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Publication Identifiers

Address
Yokohama, Japan

Publisher
IEEE

Volume
3

Number of pages
7
Starting page
4819
Last page
4826

Document Identifiers
DOI - https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611413
ISBN - 979-8-3503-8457-4

Rankings
CORE A* (2025) -

Keywords
Empirical Study Physical Units Robotic Systems


Export

APA
Paulo Canelas, Trenton Tabor, John-Paul Ore, Alcides Fonseca, Claire Le Goues, Christopher S. Timperley, (2024). Is it a Bug? Understanding Physical Unit Mismatches in Robot Software. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 4819-4826

IEEE
Paulo Canelas, Trenton Tabor, John-Paul Ore, Alcides Fonseca, Claire Le Goues, Christopher S. Timperley, "Is it a Bug? Understanding Physical Unit Mismatches in Robot Software" in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Yokohama, Japan, 2024, pp. 4819-4826, doi: 10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611413

BIBTEX
@InProceedings{61786, author = {Paulo Canelas and Trenton Tabor and John-Paul Ore and Alcides Fonseca and Claire Le Goues and Christopher S. Timperley}, title = {Is it a Bug? Understanding Physical Unit Mismatches in Robot Software}, booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}, year = 2024, pages = {4819-4826}, address = {Yokohama, Japan}, publisher = {IEEE} }