The Usability Argument for ROS-based Architectural Description Languages

<p dir="ltr">Component-based architectures in robotics, like the Robot Operating System (ROS), simplify system development by integrating reusable, off-the-shelf components. However, these components often lack sufficient documentation on their use and the architectures they form, leading to architectural misconfigurations. General-purpose Architectural Description Languages (ADLs) effectively provide properties to detect misconfigurations but are burdensome to use, as they require mapping new language-specific concepts to the ROS domain. This work compares the specification of general-purpose ADL against a novel ADL embedding ROS-specific knowledge. By mapping the language’s syntax with ROS concepts, we argue that practitioners can more easily understand and reason about specifications written in the language. We provide an example and compare it with a general-purpose ADL.</p>