International audienceA large number of robotic software have been developed but cannot or can hardly interoperate with each other because of their dependencies on specific hardware or software platform is hard-wired into the code. Consequently, robotic software is hard and expensive to develop because there is little opportunity of reuse and because low-level details must be taken into account in early phases. Moreover, robotic experts can hardly develop their application without programming knowledge or the help of programming experts and robotic software is difficult to adapt to hardware or target-platform changes. In this paper we report on the development of RobotML, a Robotic Modeling Language that eases the design of robotic applications, their simulation and their deployment to multiple target execution platforms

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Robotic systems (RSs) are often used for performing critical tasks with little or no human intervention. Such RSs must satisfy certain dependability requirements including reliability, availability, security and safety. In this paper, we focus on the safety aspect and propose a methodology and associated framework for safety assessment of RSs in the early phases of development. The methodology relies upon model-driven engineering approach and describes a preliminary safety assessment of safety-critical RSs using fault tree (FT) analysis (FTA). The framework supports a domain specific language for RSs called RobotML and includes facilities (i) to automatically generate or manually construct FTs and perform both qualitative and quantitative FTA, (ii) to make semantic connections with formal verification and FTA tools, (iii) to represent FTA results in the RobotML modeling environment. In the case study, we illustrate the proposed methodology and framework by considering a mobile robot developed in the scope of the Proteus project.978-1-4673-6358-7/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

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