Continuous Integration and Delivery of ROS2 projects

Autonomous systems are becoming increasingly capable and are used in manifold situations in our entire life. Ranging from aerospace, healthcare, autonomous driving, industry, agriculture to home automation, these complex systems are embedded in sensitive, safety-critical and complex environments that demand a high degree of software quality. One important building block for software quality is Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD). However, previous work has shown a lack of sophisticated CI/CD in robotics projects, especially for projects using the popular ROS (Robot Operating System). This work suggests CIRDAN, a CI/CD framework that enables robotic developers to make use of a wide variety of CI/CD features offered by GitLab CI, like testing, code coverage, code analysis and publishing releases. Since previous work has focused on a cloud-based approach, we developed CIRDAN as an on-premise solution. With CIRDAN we provide multiple Docker images for CPU architectures amd64, arm64 and riscv64. The framework itself as well as the Docker images and experimental ROS2 binaries are provided as open-source. The framework has been successfully applied in multiple autonomous systems research projects.