ROSSi A Graphical Programming Interface for ROS 2

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS) offers developers a large number of ready-made packages for developing robot programs. The multitude of packages and the different interfaces or adapters is also the reason why ROS projects often tend to become confusing. Concepts of model-driven software development using a domain-specific modeling language could counteract this and at the same time speed up the development process of such projects. This is investigated in this paper by transferring the core concepts from ROS 2 into a graphical programming interface. Elements of established graphical programming tools are compared and approaches from modeling languages such as UML are used to create a novel approach for graphical development of ROS projects. The resulting interface is evaluated through the development of a project built on ROS, and the approach shows promise towards facilitating work with the Robot Operating System.