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.

There are significant difficulties in deploying and reusing application code within the robotics community. Container technology proves to be a viable solution for such problems, as containers isolate application code and all its dependencies from the surrounding computational environment. They are also light, fast and performant. Manual generation of configuration files required by orchestration tools such as Docker Compose is very time-consuming, especially for more complex scenarios. In this paper a solution is presented to ease the development and deployment of Robot Operating System (ROS) packages using containers, by automatically generating all files used by Docker Compose to both containerize and orchestrate multiple ROS workspaces, supporting multiple ROS distributions and multi-robot scenarios. The proposed solution also generates Dockerfiles and is capable of building new Docker images at run-time, given a list of desired ROS packages to be containerized. Integration with existing Docker images is supported, even if non-ROS-related. After an analysis of existing solutions and techniques for containerizing ROS nodes, the multi-stage pipeline adopted by the proposed solution for file generation is detailed. Then, a real usage example of the proposed tool is presented, showcasing how it an aid both the development and deployment of new ROS packages and features.

Continuous Integration and Deployment in the robotics domain is still underutilized when compared to other fields of software development. Also, conventional testing techniques used in CI/CD pipelines are usually not enough to fully test a robotic project in its integrity. In this paper, an analysis is made regarding the usage of CI/CD techniques in robotic related repositories to both verify the veracity of these statements, as well as finding their causes. Additionally, a novel approach in the scope of CI/CD is explored, making use of cloud-based technologies to add additional automated simulation tests to the pipeline and integrate them with ease in the development of robotic software. Finally, the proposed approach is showcased in an industrial application.

The contemporary adoption of Cyber-Physical Systems and improvements in robotic applications in industrial scenarios demands for horizontal integration mechanisms with already existing automation equipment, controlled by PLCs. This paper aims to shorten the gap between the automation and robotics domain, by proposing an Interprocess Communication method to establish interoperability between robotic systems and automation equipment in a reliable and straightforward manner. In particular, this paper introduces a novel approach for linking ROS and IEC 61131–3 by way of shared memory interfaces, enabling and promoting their interactions. Moreover, this paper addresses the applied synchronization mechanism for handling concurrent accesses to the shared memory location, explores data type mapping between ROS and IEC 61131–3, and identifies some practical industrial applications.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is nowadays one of the most popular frameworks for developing robotic applications. To ensure the (much needed) dependability and safety of such applications we forecast an increasing demand for ROS-specific coding standards, static analyzers, and tools alike. Unfortunately, the development of such standards and tools can be hampered by ROS modularity and configurability, namely the substantial number of primitives (and respective variants) that must, in principle, be considered. To quantify the severity of this problem, we have mined a large number of existing ROS packages to understand how its primitives are used in practice, and to determine which combinations of primitives are most popular. This paper presents and discusses the results of this study, and hopefully provides some guidance for future standardization efforts and tool developers.