A Container-Based Framework for Developing ROS Applications

Abstract

Modern software engineering practices to enable reproducible and easy to deploy robotics solutions have been embraced in recent years, leading to an increasing adoption of container technologies within the Robot Operating System (ROS) community. However, there is still no common procedure or tools for creating, testing, and deploying containerized ROS packages. A common way to work with containerized ROS applications would prove beneficial by increasing even more the level of collaboration among development teams, help in reusing existing solutions, and automate the development of new ones. This paper presents a software framework to support the development of ROS applications using Docker containers, across all its stages. Besides containerizing ROS packages, the presented tool also assists in the deployment of containerized solutions as well as the creation of complex simulation environments for testing. The tool also provides a way for these simulations to be assessed at run-time using a property-specific language targeting ROS applications. An industrial and a scientific scenario are presented to portray the usage of the proposed tool.