So, I am back from London where I attended the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023).
I had many interesting conversations with many other researchers and roboticists around the world, and there is definitely a strong need of pushing further the boundaries of Software Engineering practices and techniques in robotics, ranging from better approaches for measuring/evaluating an already-operational ROS-based system, better debugging it, or improving its underlying communication infrastructure. There is so much to work on! As a very famous tattoo artist told me: I wish I had more hands!

Anyway, I was at the conference because I was kindly invited by Alcino Cunha to deliver a talk at the QRARSAC workshop on our studies on the guidelines for architecting ROS-based systems (like this one we presented at ICSE 2020, or this other one we published at the JSS journal in 2021). Since recently we have been more active on conducting experiments on the architecture of robotics software, rather than on mining guidelines, I accepted Alcino’s invitation with the caveat of presenting something else 🙂 So, I ended up giving the following talk:

• Title: Conducting Experiments on the Software Architecture of Robotic Systems
• Abstract: Today robotic systems are central to many industrial sectors, such as logistics, autonomous warehousing, and healthcare. If on one side ROS is helping roboticists by providing a standardized communication platform for robotic systems, on the other side ROS systems are getting more and more large and complex, thus making it extremely difficult to ensure their level of quality, e.g., in terms of performance, security, energy efficiency, testability, maintainability. Improving the quality of robotic systems is not a new activity, but in this talk, we tackle it from a different perspective: we look at them from a software architecture perspective. In this talk, I will walk you through a series of experiments we conducted at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam targeting the architecture of ROS systems, we will discuss some architectural tactics for ROS systems, and will close with an overview of our open-source tool for automatically executing experiments on robotics software

Here are the slides of the talk, I hope you enjoy them!

As a bonus, here are some nice pictures I took during the conference, with its astounding exhibition room, a poster we presented about a work on ROS bag files with Michel Albonico and Berry Chen (one of our fantastic Bachelor students), and of course a cool picture of the London city district. Enjoy those as well!