2024
Understanding Misconfigurations in ROS: An Empirical Study and Current Approaches
Paulo Canelas, Bradley Schmerl, Alcides Fonseca, Christopher S. Timperley
International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). 2024.
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular framework for building robot software from reusable components, but configuring and connecting these components correctly is challenging. Developers often face issues due to unstated assumptions, leading to misconfigurations that can result in unpredictable and dangerous behavior. To improve the reliability of ROS projects, it is critical to identify the broader set of misconfigurations. To that end, we perform a study on ROS Answers, a Q&A platform, to categorize these misconfigurations and evaluate how well existing detection techniques cover them. We identified 12 high-level categories and 50 sub-categories, with 27 not covered by current techniques.
Is it a Bug? Understanding Physical Unit Mismatches in Robot Software
Paulo Canelas, Trenton Tabor, John-Paul Ore, Alcides Fonseca, Claire Le Goues, Christopher S. Timperley
International Conference in Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 2024.
Robot software often involves variables representing physical units like meters and seconds. Incorrect operations on these units can cause dangerous system behaviors, and detecting such errors manually is challenging. Current analysis techniques use dimensional analysis rules to find mismatches but often flag intentional mismatches, leading to false positives that impede robotics developer trust and productivity. This study inspects 180 errors detected by the Phys tool and identifies three types of physical unit mismatches, categorizing them into eight high-level categories. We find that developers often introduce intentional mismatches, such as differential drives, small angle approximations, and controls.
2023
Usability-Oriented Design of Liquid Types for Java
Catarina Gamboa, Paulo Canelas, Alcides Fonseca, Christopher S. Timperley
International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE). 2023.
2022
Data types as a more ergonomic frontend for Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming
Guilherme Espada, Leon Ingelse, Paulo Canelas, Pedro Barbosa, Alcides Fonseca
International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences. 2022.
An Experience Report on Challenges in Learning the Robot Operating System
Paulo Canelas, Miguel Tavares, Ricardo Cordeiro, Alcides Fonseca, Christopher S. Timperley
International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering (RoSE) at the International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE). 2022.
Grammatical Evolution Mapping for Semantically-Constrained Genetic Programming
Alcides Fonseca, Paulo Santos, Guilherme Espada, Sara Silva
Genetic Programming Theory and Practice XVIII. 2022.
2021
Augmenting Search-based Techniques with Static Synthesis-based Input Generation
Paulo Santos, José Campos, Christopher S. Timperley, Alcides Fonseca
International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) at the International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE). 2021.
2020
The Usability Argument for Refinement Typed Genetic Programming
Alcides Fonseca, Paulo Santos, Sara Silva
International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature. 2020.
Refined Typed Genetic Programming as a user interface for Genetic Programming
Paulo Santos, Alcides Fonseca, Sara Silva
Short Paper. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO). 2020.