BIBLIOS

Document type
Conference papers

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
ROSpec: A Domain-Specific Language for ROS-Based Robot Software

Participants in the publication
Paulo Canelas (Author)
Dep. Informática
Unidade de I&D e Inovação
LASIGE
Bradley Schmerl (Author)
Alcides Fonseca (Author)
Dep. Informática
LASIGE
Christopher S. Timperley (Author)

Summary
Component-based robot software frameworks, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), allow developers to quickly compose and execute systems by focusing on configuring and integrating reusable, off-the-shelf components. However, these components often lack documentation on how to configure and integrate them correctly. Even when documentation exists, its natural language specifications are not enforced, resulting in misconfigurations that lead to unpredictable and potentially dangerous robot behaviors. In this work, we introduce ROSpec, a ROS-tailored domain-specific language designed to specify and verify component configurations and their integration. ROSpec's design is grounded in ROS domain concepts and informed by a prior empirical study on misconfigurations, allowing the language to provide a usable and expressive way of specifying and detecting misconfigurations. At a high level, ROSpec verifies the correctness of argument and component configurations, ensures the correct integration of components by checking their communication properties, and checks if configurations respect the assumptions and constraints of their deployment context. We demonstrate ROSpec's ability to specify and verify components by modeling a medium-sized warehouse robot with 19 components, and by manually analyzing, categorizing, and implementing partial specifications for components from a dataset of 182 misconfiguration questions extracted from a robotics Q&A platform.


Event
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Publication Identifiers



Document Identifiers
DOI - https://doi.org/10.1145/3763169

Rankings
Google Metrics Q1 (2025)

Keywords
Domain-Specific Language Misconfigurations Robot Operating System