Model-based integration testing of ROS packages: A mobile robot case study

We apply model-based testing - a black box testing technology - to improve the state of the art of integration testing of navigation and localisation software for mobile robots built in ROS. Online model-based testing involves building executable models of the requirements and executing them in parallel with the implementation under test (IUT). In the current paper we present an automated approach to generating a model from the topological map that specifies where the robot can move to. In addition, we show how to specify scenarios of interest and how to add human models to the simulated environment according to a specified scenario. We measure the quality of the tests by code coverage, and empirically show that it is possible to achieve increased test coverage by specifying simple scenarios on the automatically generated model of the topological map. The scenarios augmented by adding humans to specified rooms at specified stages of the scenario simulate the changes in the environment caused by humans. Since we test navigation at coordinate and topological level, we report on finding problems related to the topological map.