Enhancing ROS Debugging: A User-Centric Diagnostic Framework
Primary research
#345
- Topic
- Robotics and Embodied AI
- First seen
- 2026-07-16 23:33:01
- Last seen
- 2026-07-16 23:33:01
Source raw items (1)
- Semantic Scholar2026-07-16 23:31:51Enhancing ROS Debugging: A User-Centric Diagnostic Framework
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source software framework often utilised in robotics, providing standardised libraries for building complex robotic systems. However, ROS's distributed architecture and messaging system create barriers for understanding robot status and diagnosing system anomalies, particularly for developers with limited ROS expertise. We propose ROS Help Desk (RosHD), an agentic AI system for autonomous anomaly detection and debugging of ROS-based robotic systems, with expertise-adaptive assistance. RosHD continuously monitors system logs and multimodal sensor streams (lidar, RGB cameras) to detect anomalies, and provides developers with customised debugging support via specialised sensor analysis tools, diagnostic tools, ROS diagnostic utilities, code analysis capabilities, and a unified chat interface. We present the first empirical evaluation of expertise-adaptive LLM-powered debugging for ROS through a controlled user study with novice through advanced developers ($N=28$). Participants using RosHD achieved 92.85% task success compared to 17.86% with baseline assistance, reducing debugging time by up to 72% across experience levels.