Industry Best Practices in Robotics Software Engineering
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院）；Robert Bosch Corporate Research（罗伯特·博世企业研究院）；Waymo；XITASO GmbH（XITASO有限公司）；Mälardalen University（梅拉达伦大学）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Robert Bocchino, Arne Nordmann, Allison Thackston, Andreas Angerer, Federico Ciccozzi, Ivano Malavolta, Andreas Wortmann
Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key takeaways that emerged from the discussion among the panelists and the workshop, ranging from architecting practices at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, model-driven development at Bosch, development and testing of autonomous driving systems at Waymo, and testing of robotics software at XITASO. Researchers and practitioners can build on the contents of this paper to gain a fresh perspective on their activities and focus on the most pressing practices and challenges in developing robotics software today.
Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, Toshiba Europe Ltd.（东芝欧洲有限公司布里斯托尔研究与创新实验室）
Mobile robots have disrupted the material handling industry which is witnessing radical changes. The requirement for enhanced automation across various industry segments often entails mobile robotic systems operating in logistics facilities with little/no infrastructure. In such environments, out-of-box low-cost robotic solutions are desirable. Wireless connectivity plays a crucial role in successful operation of such mobile robotic systems. A wireless mesh network of mobile robots is an attractive solution; however, a number of system-level challenges create unique and stringent service requi…
In this work we present an account of the status of requirements engineering in the gaming industry. Recent papers in the area were surveyed. Characterizations of the gaming industry were deliberated upon by portraying its relations with the market industry. Some research directions in the area of requirements engineering in the gaming industry were also mentioned.
Robots are being applied in a vast range of fields, leading researchers and practitioners to write tasks more complex than in the past. The robot software complexity increases the difficulty of engineering the robot's software components with quality requirements. Researchers and practitioners have applied software engineering (SE) approaches and robotic domains to address this issue in the last two decades. This study aims to identify, classify and evaluate the current state-of-the-art Software Engineering for Robotic Systems (SERS). We systematically selected and analyzed 50 primary studies …
University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；Radboud University Nijmegen（拉德堡德大学）；University of Bergamo（贝加莫大学）
Robots that support humans by performing useful tasks (a.k.a., service robots) are booming worldwide. In contrast to industrial robots, the development of service robots comes with severe software engineering challenges, since they require high levels of robustness and autonomy to operate in highly heterogeneous environments. As a domain with critical safety implications, service robotics faces a need for sound software development practices. In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study to assess the state of the art and practice of robotics software engineering. We conducte…
The use of conceptual models to foster requirements engineering has been proposed and evaluated as beneficial for several decades. For instance, goal-oriented requirements engineering or the specification of scenarios are commonly done using conceptual models. Bringing such model-based requirements engineering approaches into industrial practice typically requires industrial training. In this paper, we report lessons learned from a training program for teaching industry professionals model-based requirements engineering. Particularly, we as educators and learners report experiences from design…
In light of the 40th jubilee of Requirements Engineering (RE), roughly 40 experts met in Switzerland to discuss where our discipline stands today. As of today, the common view is, indisputably, that RE as a discipline is stable and respected, as pointed out by Sarah Gregory when covering the seminar in her column to which articles like this one are invited to present ongoing research. However, it is also evident that after 40 years of promising research, conducting research that industry needs is still an ongoing challenge. Research that industry needs means research that solves industrial pro…
University of York（约克大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）
The wide use of robotic systems contributed to developing robotic software highly coupled to the hardware platform running the robotic system. Due to increased maintenance cost or changing business priorities, the robotic hardware is infrequently upgraded, thus increasing the risk for technology stagnation. Reducing this risk entails migrating the system and its software to a new hardware platform. Conventional software engineering practices such as complete re-development and code-based migration, albeit useful in mitigating these obsolescence issues, they are time-consuming and overly expens…
Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Robotics: A Research Agenda
Simula Research Laboratory（Simula研究实验室）；University of York（约克大学）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Southwest University（西南大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科学与技术大学）
Mobile application development is the most rapidly growing industry in the world. Nowadays, people totally depend on smart phones for performing daily routine tasks which results in tremendous rises in the expectation of human being from IT industry which increase the requirements of human being. In order to tackle the uncontrolled changes in the requirements, IT experts performed some proper requirement engineering process (REP). Therefore, in this paper we are performing industry survey by asking them several questions related to the REP from android developer in order to understand the REP …
The dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 has created great enthusiasm among companies and researchers by giving them an opportunity to pave the path towards the vision of a connected smart factory ecosystem. However, in context of automotive industry there is an evident gap between the requirements supported by the current automotive manufacturing execution systems (MES) and the requirements proposed by industrial standards from the International Society of Automation (ISA) such as, ISA-95, ISA-88 over which the Industry 4.0 is being built on. In this paper, we bridge this ga…
In the past 10 years, several researches studied video game development process who proposed approaches to improve the way how games are developed. These approaches usually adopt agile methodologies because of claims that traditional practices and the waterfall process are gone. However, are the "old days" really gone in the game industry? In this paper, we present a survey of software engineering processes in video game industry from postmortem project analyses. We analyzed 20 postmortems from Gamasutra Portal. We extracted their processes and modelled them through using the Business Process …
Simula Research Laboratory（西穆拉研究实验室）；Sintef Digital（挪威科技工业研究院数字分部）；Sweetzpot（Sweetzpot公司）
Increasing the impact of software engineering research in the software industry and the society at large has long been a concern of high priority for the software engineering community. The problem of two cultures, research conducted in a vacuum (disconnected from the real world), or misaligned time horizons are just some of the many complex challenges standing in the way of successful industry-academia collaborations. This paper reports on the experience of research collaboration and knowledge co-creation between industry and academia in software engineering as a way to bridge the research-pr…
Context: Research collaborations between software engineering industry and academia can provide significant benefits to both sides, including improved innovation capacity for industry, and real-world environment for motivating and validating research ideas. However, building scalable and effective research collaborations in software engineering is known to be challenging. While such challenges can be varied and many, in this paper we focus on the challenges of achieving participative knowledge creation supported by active dialog between industry and academia and continuous commitment to joint …
It has been 50 years since the term software engineering was coined in 1968 at a NATO conference. The field should be relatively mature by now, with most established universities covering core software engineering topics in their Computer Science programs and others offering specialized degrees. However, still many practitioners lament a lack of skills in new software engineering hires. With the growing demand for software engineers from the industry, this apparent gap becomes more and more pronounced. One corporate strategy to address this gap is for the industry to develop supplementary trai…
ROS-related Robotic Systems Development with V-model-based Application of MeROS Metamodel
Warsaw University of Technology, Institute of Control（华沙技术大学控制学院）；Warsaw University of Technology, Institute of Computer Science（华沙技术大学计算机科学学院）；Industrial Research Institute for Automation（自动化与测量工业研究院）；Ukrainian Catholic University, Applied Science Faculty（乌克兰天主教大学应用科学学院）
Software needs to be secure, in particular, when deployed to critical infrastructures. Secure coding guidelines capture practices in industrial software engineering to ensure the security of code. This study aims to assess the level of awareness of secure coding in industrial software engineering, the skills of software developers to spot weaknesses in software code, avoid them, and the organizational support to adhere to coding guidelines. The approach draws on well-established theories of policy compliance, neutralization theory, and security-related stress and the authors' many years of exp…
Context: The use of standards is considered a vital part of any engineering discipline. So one could expect that standards play an important role in Requirements Engineering (RE) as well. However, little is known about the actual knowledge and use of RE-related standards in industry. Objective: In this article, we investigate to which extent standards and related artifacts such as templates or guidelines are known and used by RE practitioners. Method: To this end, we have conducted a questionnaire-based online survey. We could analyze the replies from 90 RE practitioners using a combination of…
Diversity is an essential aspect of software development because technology influences almost every aspect of modern society, and if the software industry lacks diversity, software products might unintentionally constrain groups of individuals instead of promoting an equalitarian experience to all. In this study, we investigate the perspectives of transgender software professionals about a career in software engineering as one of the aspects of diversity in the software industry. Our findings demonstrate that, on the one hand, trans people choose careers in software engineering for two primary…
According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with industry needs. To synthesize that body of knowledge, we present in this paper a systematic literature review (SLR) which summarizes the findings of 33 studies in this area. By doing a meta-analysis of all those studies and using data from 12 countries a…
Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practi…
Runtime Verification and Field-based Testing for ROS-based Robotic Systems
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI)（格兰萨索科学研究所）；University of Brasilia（巴西利亚大学）；Ruhr University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
This concept paper outlines some recent efforts toward the design and development of user-integrated semi-autonomous home-sized lawn mowing systems from a systems engineering perspective. This is an important and emerging field of study within the robotics and systems engineering communities. The work presented includes a review of current progress on this problem, a discussion of the problem from a systems engineering perspective, a general system architecture developed by the authors, and a preliminary set of design requirements. This work is meant to provide a baseline and motivation for th…
Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during conducting empirical research in the software industry by means of a systematic and structured approach. The protocol developed in this paper should serve as a practical guide for researchers and help them with conducting empirical research in this complex environment.
There is an increasing interest in research on the combination of AI techniques and methods with MDE. However, there is a gap between AI and MDE practices, as well as between researchers and practitioners. This paper tackles this gap by reporting on industrial requirements in this field. In the AIDOaRt research project, practitioners and researchers collaborate on AI-augmented automation supporting modeling, coding, testing, monitoring, and continuous development in cyber-physical systems. The project specifically lies at the intersection of industry and academia collaboration with several ind…
Digitalization is forging its path in the architecture, construction, engineering, operation (AECO) industry. This trend demands not only solutions for data governance but also sophisticated cyber-physical systems with a high variety of stakeholder background and very complex requirements. Existing approaches to general requirements engineering ignore the context of the AECO industry. This makes it harder for the software engineers usually lacking the knowledge of the industry context to elicit, analyze and structure the requirements and to effectively communicate with AECO professionals. To l…
The Continuous software engineering is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The Continuous software engineering practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: (1) to explore the Continuous software engineering challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study; (2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy pro…
What is the impact of software engineering research on current practices in industry? In this paper, I report on my direct experience as a PhD/post-doc working in software engineering research projects, and then spending the following five years as an engineer in two different companies (the first one being the same I worked in collaboration with during my post-doc). Given a background in software engineering research, what cutting-edge techniques and tools from academia did I use in my daily work when developing and testing the systems of these companies? Regarding validation and verification…
Software engineering educators are continually challenged by rapidly evolving concepts, technologies, and industry demands. Due to the omnipresence of software in a digitalized society, higher education institutions (HEIs) have to educate the students such that they learn how to learn, and that they are equipped with a profound basic knowledge and with latest knowledge about modern software and system development. Since industry demands change constantly, HEIs are challenged in meeting such current and future demands in a timely manner. This paper analyzes the current state of practice in soft…
Gamification has been used to motivate and engage participants in software engineering education and practice activities. There is a significant demand for empirical studies for the understanding of the impacts and efficacy of gamification. However, the lack of standard procedures and models for the evaluation of gamification is a challenge for the design, comparison, and report of results related to the assessment of gamification approaches and its effects. The goal of this study is to identify models and strategies for the evaluation of gamification reported in the literature. To achieve thi…
