Design and Development of a Physical Integration Testing Framework for Robotic Manipulators

Collaborative robots have the potential to change small to medium sized industry by automating various tasks that are today performed manually. In this paper we present an open source framework for automatically testing applications developed for this type of robot. This framework can be used for improving the quality of robot control software while reducing the cost of testing. Through a case study we demonstrate the current capabilities of the framework for automated testing of a pick and place application. By integrating the framework into a Continuous Integration pipeline it becomes possible to automatically test a robot whenever a change is made to either its hardware or its software components.