A systematic testing approach for autonomous mobile robots using domain-specific languages

Abstract

One aspect often neglected during the development of autonomous mobile robots is the systematic validation of their overall behavior. Especially large robots applied to real-world scenarios may cause injuries or even human death and must therefore be classified as safety-critical. In this paper, a generic approach to defining and executing purposeful test runs using domain-specific languages (dsls) is presented. Test cases can be defined in an appropriate test description language (first dsl). These test cases can be derived automatically using a model-based testing approach, for which a test model has to be created. Hence, a second dsl for the creation of the test model is presented. It is further shown how the generated test cases are automatically executed and evaluated. The paper concludes with the application of the approach to the autonomous off-road robot ravon. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.