MeROS: Metamodel for ROS-based Systems

—The complexity of today’s robot control systems implies difficulty in developing them efficiently and reliably. Systems engineering (SE) and frameworks come to help. The framework metamodels are needed to support the standardisation and correctness of the created application models. Although the use of frameworks is widespread nowadays, for the most popular of them, Robot Operating System (ROS) version 1, a complete, contemporary metamodel, has been missing so far. This article proposes a new metamodel for ROS (MeROS), which addresses both the running system and developer workspace. For compatibility with the latest versions of ROS 1, the metamodel includes the latest ROS 1 concepts such as nodelet, action, and metapackage. An essential addition to the original ROS concepts is the grouping concepts, which provide an opportunity to illustrate the decomposition of the system, as well as varying degrees of detail in its presentation. The metamodel is derived from the requirements and then verified on the practical example of the Rico assistive robot. The matter is described in the SysML language, supported by standard development tools to conduct projects in the spirit of SE.

[1]  F. Ingrand,et al.  A formal toolchain for offline and run-time verification of robotic systems , 2022, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[2]  C. Zieliński,et al.  Parameterised robotic system meta-model expressed by Hierarchical Petri nets , 2022, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[3]  Tomasz Winiarski,et al.  Grasped Object Weight Compensation in Reference to Impedance Controlled Robots , 2021, Energies.

[4]  Tomasz Winiarski,et al.  HuBeRo - a Framework to Simulate Human Behaviour in Robot Research , 2021, Journal of Automation, Mobile Robotics and Intelligent Systems.

[5]  Emmanuel Grolleau,et al.  RoBMEX: ROS-based modelling framework for end-users and experts , 2021, J. Syst. Archit..

[6]  Tomasz Winiarski,et al.  Scheduling of a Robot’s Tasks With the TaskER Framework , 2020, IEEE Access.

[7]  Byoung Wook Choi,et al.  Real-Time Characteristics of ROS 2.0 in Multiagent Robot Systems: An Empirical Study , 2020, IEEE Access.

[8]  Jafar Saniie,et al.  Design Flow of Wireless Body Sensor Network for Human Activity Classification using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network , 2020, 2020 IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (EIT).

[9]  N. Garcia.  Bootstrapping MDE Development from ROS Manual Code , 2020, International Journal of Robotic Computing.

[10]  Konrad Banachowicz,et al.  EARL—Embodied Agent-Based Robot Control Systems Modelling Language , 2020, Electronics.

[11]  Cezary Zielinski,et al.  FABRIC: Framework for Agent-Based Robot Control Systems , 2019, 2019 12th International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control (RoMoCo).

[12]  Zhijun Yang,et al.  Development of an EMG-Controlled Mobile Robot , 2018, Robotics.

[13]  Pericles A. Mitkas,et al.  Robotic frameworks, architectures and middleware comparison , 2017, ArXiv.

[14]  Cezary Zielinski,et al.  Variable structure robot control systems: The RAPP approach , 2017, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[15]  Brahim Bouzouia,et al.  A survey of development frameworks for robotics , 2016, 2016 8th International Conference on Modelling, Identification and Control (ICMIC).

[16]  Shinpei Kato,et al.  Exploring the performance of ROS2 , 2016, 2016 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT).

[17]  Selma Kchir,et al.  RobotML for industrial robots: Design and simulation of manipulation scenarios , 2016, 2016 IEEE 21st International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA).

[18]  Alois Zoitl,et al.  A model based engineering tool for ROS component compositioning, configuration and generation of deployment information , 2016, 2016 IEEE 21st International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA).

[19]  Christian Schlegel,et al.  The SmartMDSD Toolchain: An Integrated MDSD Workflow and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Robotics Software , 2016 .

[20]  Konrad Banachowicz,et al.  Automated generation of component system for the calibration of the service robot kinematic parameters , 2015, 2015 20th International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics (MMAR).

[21]  Gabor Karsai,et al.  ROSMOD: a toolsuite for modeling, generating, deploying, and managing distributed real-time component-based software using ROS , 2015, 2015 International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping (RSP).

[22]  Onn Shehory,et al.  Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: Reflections on Architectures, Methodologies, Languages, and Frameworks , 2014 .

[23]  Alexander Verl,et al.  BRIDE - A toolchain for framework-independent development of industrial service robot applications , 2014, ISR 2014.

[24]  Luca Gherardi,et al.  Variability Modeling and Resolution in Component-based Robotics Systems , 2013 .

[25]  Sebastian Wrede,et al.  A Meta-model and Toolchain for Improved Interoperability of Robotic Frameworks , 2012, SIMPAR.

[26]  Fernando Díaz del Río,et al.  Robotics software frameworks for multi-agent robotic systems development , 2012, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[27]  Cezary Zielinski,et al.  Motion Generation in the MRROC++ Robot Programming Framework , 2010, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[28]  Ernest Mnkandla,et al.  About software engineering frameworks and methodologies , 2009, AFRICON 2009.

[29]  C.J.H. Mann,et al.  A Practical Guide to SysML: The Systems Modeling Language , 2009 .

[30]  Herman Bruyninckx,et al.  Open robot control software: the OROCOS project , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[31]  Eduardo Valentin,et al.  A survey of Model Driven Engineering in robotics , 2021, J. Comput. Lang..

[32]  Tomasz Kornuta,et al.  A universal architectural pattern and specification method for robot control system design , 2023, Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences Technical Sciences.

[33]  Pratik Kadam,et al.  ROS based SLAM implementation for Autonomous navigation using Turtlebot , 2020, ITM Web of Conferences.

[34]  Cezary Zieliński,et al.  Robotic System Specification Methodology Based on Hierarchical Petri Nets , 2020, IEEE Access.

[35]  Jean-Marc Jézéquel,et al.  Model Driven Engineering , 2017, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[36]  Davide Brugali,et al.  HyperFlex: a model driven toolchain for designing and configuring software control systems for autonomous robots , 2016 .

[37]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[38]  Sanford Friedenthal,et al.  A Practical Guide to SysML: The Systems Modeling Language , 2008 .

[39]  Jean Bézivin,et al.  In Search of a Basic Principle for Model Driven Engineering , 2004 .

[40]  Herman Bruyninckx,et al.  OROCOS : design and implementation of a robot control software framework , 2002 .