Model-driven Engineering and Simulation of Industrial Robots with ROS

Industrial automation is the earliest and best established application of robotics. Today, however, increasing complexity of industrial robotics applications places high demands on system integrators. In order to make this complexity more manageable, we developed a model-driven engineering approach for the modular composition and simulation of complex ensembles of industrial robots based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). The approach consists of a domain-specific profile for the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and a model-to-text transformation for automatic generation of artifacts required for control and simulation. The modelling methodology and code generation were successfully applied to a use case example which is also described in the paper.