Towards application level testing of ROS networks

Robotics is a highly interdisciplinary field where applications of complex architectures are built to solve challenging problems. Integration of multiple components in this environment continues to be a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone activity. Typical approaches in parallel component development or composition from re-usable components focus on structural and static aspects like ROS message and topic definitions. However, the behavioural part of robot software components is hardly ever specified in sufficient detail. In this work, we tackle this issue by proposing an application-level testing framework for robot software applications that uses a fluent API to describe the expected behaviour of an application or its components. This is a first step towards test-first based development of robot software in order to increase robot software quality.