Marcela G. Dos Santos ^1* Sylvain Hallé ¹ Fabio Petrillo ² Yann-Gael Guéhéneuc ³

• ¹ Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Chicoutimi, Canada
• ² École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• ³ Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Industrial robotic systems (IRS) consist of industrial robots that automate industrial processes.They accurately perform repetitive tasks, replacing or assisting with dangerous jobs like assembling in the automotive and chemical industries. Failures in these systems can be catastrophic, so it's important to ensure their quality and safety before using them. One way to do this is by applying a software testing process to find faults before they become failures. However, software testing in industrial robotic systems has some challenges. These include differences in perspectives on software testing from people with diverse backgrounds, coordinating and collaborating with diverse teams, and performing software testing within the complex integration inherent in industrial environments. For traditional systems, a well-known development process uses simple, structured sentences in English to facilitate communication between project team members and business stakeholders. This process is called Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and one of the pillars of BDD is the use of templates to write user stories and scenarios and automated acceptance tests. We propose an software testing (ST) approach called automated acceptance testing for industrial robotic systems (AAT4IRS) that uses natural language to write the features and scenarios to be tested. We evaluated our ST approach through a proof-of-concept, performing a pick-and-place process and applying mutation testing to measure its effectiveness.The results show that the test suites implemented using AAT4IRS were highly effective, as 79% of the generated mutants were detected, instilling confidence in the robustness of our approach.