Leveraging domain specific modeling to increase accessibility of robot programming

Abstract

Despite the popularity of the Robot Operating System (ROS), Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) methods remain not commonly used in the community. The use of such methods would allow to reason at a higher level of abstraction and increase the accessibility of field engineers to effectively write ROS applications, while opening the way to more advanced model analysis for validation and verification. In a previous work, we made an in-depth comparative study to choose which MDE approach to apply when developing ROS applications. This study led us to choose graphical Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) as the means to facilitate the development of ROS applications. In this paper we present the MDE4ROS framework, a graphical DSL we defined to allow high level robotics applications development. This framework aims to provide a better view of the system during the development using a graphical representation and to enable higher level of abstraction with code generation of the ROS system. To illustrate our proposal we use MDE4ROS to develop a TurtleBot use case and we present an analysis of the results.