RoboFuzz: fuzzing robotic systems over robot operating system (ROS) for finding correctness bugs

Abstract

Robotic systems are becoming an integral part of human lives. Responding to the increased demands for robot productions, Robot Operating System (ROS), an open-source middleware suite for robotic development, is gaining traction by providing practical tools and libraries for quickly developing robots. In this paper, we are concerned with a relatively less-tested class of bugs in ROS and ROS-based robotic systems, called semantic correctness bugs, including the violation of specification, violation of physical laws, and cyber-physical discrepancy. These bugs often stem from the cyber-physical nature of robotic systems, in which noisy hardware components are intertwined with software components, and thus cannot be detected by existing fuzzing approaches that mostly focus on finding memory-safety bugs.