Workshop on Software Engineering for Robotics Systems (SE4Robotics)

This grant supports a workshop on Software Engineering for Robotics (SE4Robotics), which will take place in Detroit in early October, co-located with the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023). The workshop's purpose is to bring together two communities – Robotics and Software Engineering – to discuss how Software Engineering R&D can be taken into account for Robotics. Software Engineering advances the ability to develop, test and debug software, prove properties of software to verify correctness, automate code understanding, architect systems so that they are modular and maintainable, produce product lines, etc. New programming languages and tool chains may be needed to implement these advances. The field of Robotics is rapidly increasing as an economic sector, making the software engineering issues a paramount concern as robot software becomes increasingly ubiquitous. It is important to take advantage of years of software engineering algorithm development, techniques and tools, platforms, open source ecosystems, and studies of theoretical and practical limitations, rather than have the field of Robotics treat the software engineering issues afresh. Conversely, Robotics software will push the limits of current software engineering capabilities due to the special nature of the field, due to requirements such as uncertainly, new notions of system state, integration of cyber and physical components, real-time needs, and so on. The result of the workshop will be a report outlining an R&D roadmap. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.