Understanding Misconfigurations in ROS: An Empirical Study and Current Approaches

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a highly popular framework and ecosystem that allows developers to build robot software systems from reusable, off-the-shelf components. Systems are often built by customizing and connecting components into a working ensemble via configuration files. While reusable components allow developers to quickly prototype working robots in theory, in practice, ensuring that those components are configured and connected appropriately is fundamentally challenging, as evidenced by the large number of questions asked on developer forums. Developers must be careful to abide by the assumptions of individual components, which are often unchecked and unstated when building their systems. Failure to do so can result in misconfigurations that are only discovered once the robot is deployed in the field, at which point errors may lead to unpredictable and dangerous behavior. Despite misconfigurations having been studied in the broader context of software engineering, robotics software (and ROS in particular) poses domain-specific challenges with potentially disastrous consequences. To understand and improve the reliability of ROS projects, it is critical to identify the types of misconfigurations developers face. To that end, we study ROS Answers, a Q&A platform, to identify and categorize misconfigurations during ROS development. We then conduct a literature review to assess the coverage of these misconfigurations using existing detection techniques. In total, we find 12 high-level categories and 50 sub-categories of misconfigurations. Of these categories, 27 are not covered by existing techniques. To conclude, we discuss how to tackle those misconfigurations in future work.