Using AADL to model and develop ROS-based robotic application

Modern robotic systems are a combination of sophisticated software and hardware components and they offer complex functionalities. While popular middlewares that promote component-level reusability and assist development already exist, there are no established techniques or procedures that use a formal approach to robot system and architecture design yet. This work aims at the long term goal of model-based design and development of complex robot systems (and their software architectures), by surpassing current techniques based on personal expertise, and best practices, in favor of purely model-based approaches. Our contribution tackles the problem from the ground up by proposing a way to model ROS nodes, and robotic architectures in general, using the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). The result is connected to and based on ROS, but not bound to it. It provides a starting point for the future definition of a general formal framework to describe complex robotic architectures suitable for automatic code generation and system verification.