MDSD 2015 - Workshop on Formal Methods and Model-Driven Engineering in Robotics

The application of Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) approaches is increasingly getting popular and accepted in the field of robotics research. Currently, MDSD and Formal Methods are progressing as two different axes of research in robotics. MDSD concentrates more on meta-modeling, separations of concerns, model transformations, and code generation. While, formal methods depends on rigorous mathematical techniques for specification, analysis, and proof that result in correct robotic systems. However, there are several barriers that exists in these techniques that refrains the majority from adopting them. The modeling techniques in robotics concentrates more on meta-model based specification and platform-specific code generation, but in reality, it is not effective in facilitating system analysis, reasoning, and formal verification. Hence, the MDSD research in robotics should be more aligned with the primary goal of creating quality software for robotic systems. In addition, MDSD can promote formal methods adoption by increasing the abstraction level and by providing tools for formal verification for modeling artifacts.