A containerized ROS-compliant verification environment for robotic systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an architecture and a related automatic flow to generate, orchestrate and deploy a ROS-compliant verification environment for robotic systems. The architecture enables assertion-based verification by exploiting monitors automatically synthesized from LTL assertions. The monitors are encapsulated in plug-and-play ROS nodes that do not require any modification to the system under verification (SUV). To guarantee both verification accuracy and real-time constraints of the system in a resource-constrained environment even after the monitor integration, we define a novel approach to move the monitor evaluation across the different layers of an edge-to-cloud computing platform. The verification environment is containerized for both cloud and edge computing using Docker to enable system portability and to handle, at run-time, the resources allocated for verification. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed architecture have been evaluated on a complex distributed system implementing a mobile robot path planner based on 3D simultaneous localization and mapping.