Verification-Centered Low-Code for Autonomous Robots: A Contract-Based Reference Architecture Approach

Low-code approaches are simplifying and accelerating software development in business domains. However, the paradigm of low-code has not yet been successfully applied in the field of embedded systems and robotics. This paper presents a verification-centered low-code approach that makes compositional, contract-based assurance a first-class feature. At its core is a Reference Architecture (RA) that standardizes capability interfaces as contracts and fixes interaction, fault, and timing policies. By constraining variability, this RA reduces state-space blow-ups and makes property instantiation routine. A Structure DSL defines RA interfaces and bindings, while a Mission DSL expresses task logic as strategies over these same bindings. Both DSLs compile to Dezyne models for automated protocol checks, deadlock freedom, and selected safety/liveness properties. Moreover, a functional specialization of the RA for the robotics domain enables code generation for the ROS 2 platform, which increases development speed and improves assurance. An initial pick-and-place case indicates reduced modeling effort and increased reuse, trading some fine-grained timed expressiveness for faster authoring and repeatable, architecture-aligned verification.