Automated Testing of Standard Conformance for Robots.

Verifying that robots conform to standards is an essential part of any responsible development process. A common technique to verify whether robots faithfully meet the requirements of standards is testing. Unfortunately, conformance testing is, to a large extent, a manual and therefore costly exercise which needs to be repeated for every robot under test. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to robot standard conformance testing (RSCT). Based on an analysis of conformance clauses in robot standards (e.g., ISO 23482–1 and ISO 10218) we identify, harmonise and formalise high-level properties representing the assertions to be tested. To verify whether properties hold, we put forward a Robot Test Definition Language (RTDL) which enables developers to specify reusable test scenarios which can be executed in simulation. We evaluate the approach with four heterogeneous robot platforms, identifying previously undiscovered defects in a robot driver. Our approach enables the automated testing of 40% of the conformance clauses defined in ISO 23482–1.