Robot Software Manifesto

Pillars of robot software stack

• Software engineering practices
• Unit Tests
• Logs
• Dumps (crash/memory)
• Visualization
• System behaviour description
• System Tests
• Hardware Tests

Most important thing is testing

Testing and validation is already hard for complex-sizable software. Throw in dynamic, partially observable, nondeterministic, competitive, continuous, sequential environment and get ready to lose your hair.

See: Why there aren’t more robots out there?

Any third party library should be abstacted. (Including ROS, especially ROS)

ROS is indispensible in the toolbox of many companies for a good reason. It provides valuable mechanisms that help with logging, communication, visualization, debugging etc. But such blessings can be curse when we don’t properly utilize them.