Documentation and Modeling of ROS Systems

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is frequently used to develop complex robotic systems with many interacting software components. While ROS provides several tools for visualizing active ROS deployments, it lacks tools for Model-Based Engineering (MBE) during the development stage, and ROS lacks tools for easily documenting the interfaces and deployed components other than specific configuration and launch files themselves. This paper presents a software tool chain - dubbed CHRIS ROS Modeling - that enables users to document an existing ROS deployment. The information is stored as instances of a simplified metamodel in portable formats. The resulting information serves to document an existing system and will serve as the foundation for future work to develop an integrated MBE system. This paper compares our approach to similar approaches currently in development.