Fuzz Testing in Behavior-Based Robotics

The behavior of a robot is typically expressed as a set of source code files written using a programming language. As for any software engineering activity, programming robotic behaviors is a complex and error-prone task. This paper propose a methodology that aims to reduce the cost of producing a reliable software describing a robotic behavior by automatically testing it. We employ a fuzz testing technique to stress software components with randomly generated data. By applying fuzz testing to a complex robotic-software, we identified errors related to the coding, the way data is handled, the logic of the robotic behavior, and the initialization of architectural components. Furthermore, a panel of experts acquainted with the analyzed behavior have highlighted the relevance and the significance of our findings. Our fuzzer operates on the SMACH and ROS frameworks and it is available under the MIT public open source license.