The Robot Operating System (ROS) is nowadays one of the most popular frameworks for developing robotic applications. To ensure the (much needed) dependability and safety of such applications we forecast an increasing demand for ROS-specific coding standards, static analyzers, and tools alike. Unfortunately, the development of such standards and tools can be hampered by ROS modularity and configurability, namely the substantial number of primitives (and respective variants) that must, in principle, be considered. To quantify the severity of this problem, we have mined a large number of existing ROS packages to understand how its primitives are used in practice, and to determine which combinations of primitives are most popular. This paper presents and discusses the results of this study, and hopefully provides some guidance for future standardization efforts and tool developers.

The contemporary adoption of Cyber-Physical Systems and improvements in robotic applications in industrial scenarios demands for horizontal integration mechanisms with already existing automation equipment, controlled by PLCs. This paper aims to shorten the gap between the automation and robotics domain, by proposing an Interprocess Communication method to establish interoperability between robotic systems and automation equipment in a reliable and straightforward manner. In particular, this paper introduces a novel approach for linking ROS and IEC 61131-3 by way of shared memory interfaces, enabling and promoting their interactions. Moreover, this paper addresses the applied synchronization mechanism for handling concurrent accesses to the shared memory location, explores data type mapping between ROS and IEC 61131-3, and identifies some practical industrial applications.

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