Designing Drone Systems with Papyrus for Robotics.

Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are difficult to carry out by manned aircrafts. Their use brings significant environmental benefits and economic savings while reducing risks to human life. Recently, a number of approaches introduced a support for the development of drone software systems. However, the development of such systems is still largely done following ad-hoc processes without capturing systematically all requirements and constraints, and without a clear architectural vision. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the Papyrus for Robotics tool. This tool is compliant with the model-driven development approach proposed by the RobMoSys project. The tool distinguishes different stakeholders and artefacts, and has a support for high-level behavior modeling. In addition, due to the nature of the drone domain, safety concerns play an important role. For instance, a drone needs to fly in safe areas only (i.e. geo-caging) or keep a sufficient safety-distance from other drones/flying objects in the space. Thus, the tool has a specific support for safety concerns. To ensure the applicability of our tool, we have used it to perform a case study in the context of the COMP4DRONES project that targets reducing the development cost of drone systems.