Mutation Testing of Programs for Industrial Robots

In today’s manufacturing environment, industrial robots play a pivotal role in automating tasks within a tightly integrated real-time platform. Given their interaction with humans and other robots, ensuring their safety is important. This necessitates rigorous testing and verification processes throughout the development life-cycle. We consider a mutation testing approach for evaluating the robustness of industrial robot programs, by using mutations or changes in unit, system, and task levels. By injecting deliberate changes, or mutations, into the program code and creating mutated programs, mutation testing evaluates the effectiveness of a test suite by simulating alternate behaviors through mutated programs. This process detects deviations from expected behavior, thereby strengthening overall test coverage and quality assurance. We design a set of custom-built mutation operators for programs that manipulate industrial robots, including move instructions that involve 3-D geometry, changing the velocity of the robot arm movements and for low-level synchronization constructs for multi-task programs.