Student Research Abstract: A Toolchain for Model-Based Development of a Robot Application

This student research abstract reports on an ongoing work performed in the context of a PhD thesis on designing a method and putting together a toolchain that allows a model-based development of a robot application based on the robotics middleware ROS. The goal of this integration is to improve the efficiency of the robot application design and development using models and components with a set of ROS concepts ready to use. In addition, it improves the pertinence of the verification and validation phase by simulating the model and using formal verification methods such as model checking. Our approach is applied to the context of ROS, and consists to increase the abstraction of the systems through models, and leverages existing modeling, simulation, and verification environments. We use as a case study simple examples of ROS on which we apply UML, profile UML, and DSL, in order to conduct a comparative study of the abstract approaches applied on robotic systems.