Applying MDE to ROS Systems: A Comparative Analysis

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the most used software framework to develop robot applications. Although it is possible to reuse packages and code from other ROS projects, ROS applications remain low level and reasoning at a higher level of abstraction is not possible. Using Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) in the context of ROS applications would allow to increase the accessibility of ROS, leverage the reusability of packages and supply validation of the software earlier in the design, using formal methods. For instance, formal verification methods would improve the overall dependability of robotic systems. Our view is that we should increase the abstraction of the systems through models using MDE methodology in order to enable the use of formal methods on ROS applications. In this paper we do a first step toward this and propose a comparative study of existing modeling alternatives aiming to help roboticists to smoothly adopt MDE. This study compares the use of modeling in ROS systems in three different ways: by means of direct UML modeling, a ROS UML profile and a ROS Domain-Specific Language. That allows us to pick the solution that better fits our needs.