Towards flexible runtime monitoring support for ROS-based applications

Abstract

Robotic systems are becoming common in different domains and for various purposes, such as unmanned aerial vehicles performing search and rescue operations, or robots operating in manufacturing plants. Such systems are characterized by close interactions, or even collaborations, between hardware and machinery on the one hand, and humans on the other. Furthermore, as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in general and robotic applications in particular typically operate in an emergent environment, unanticipated events may occur during their operation, making the need for runtime monitoring support a crucial yet often time-consuming task. Runtime monitoring typically requires establishing support for collecting data, aggregating and transporting the data to a monitoring framework for persistence and further processing, and finally, performing checks of functional and non-functional properties. In this paper, we present our initial efforts towards a flexible monitoring framework for ROS-based systems. We report on challenges for establishing runtime monitoring support and present our preliminary architecture that aims to significantly reduce the setup and maintenance effort when creating monitors and establishing constraint checks.