Formal verification of an autonomous personal robotic assistant

Human–robot teams are likely to be used in a variety of situations wherever humans require the assistance of robotic systems. Obvious examples include healthcare and manufacturing, in which people need the assistance of machines to perform key tasks. It is essential for robots working in close proximity to people to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we examine formal verification of a high-level planner/scheduler for autonomous personal robotic assistants such as Care-O-bot ™ . We describe how a model of Care-O-bot and its environment was developed using Brahms, a multiagent workflow language. Formal verification was then carried out by translating this to the input language of an existing model checker. Finally we present some formal verification results and describe how these could be complemented by simulation-based testing and realworld end-user validation in order to increase the practical and perceived safety and trustworthiness of robotic assistants

Formal Verification of an Autonomous Personal Robotic Assistant

Human–robot teams are likely to be used in a variety of situations wherever humans require the assistance of robotic systems. Obvious examples include healthcare and manufacturing, in which people need the assistance of machines to perform key tasks. It is essential for robots working in close proximity to people to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we examine formal verification of a high-level planner/scheduler for autonomous personal robotic assistants such as CareO-bot. We describe how a model of Care-O-bot and its environment was developed using Brahms, a multiagent workflow language. Formal verification was then carried out by translating this to the input language of an existing model checker. Finally we present some formal verification results and describe how these could be complemented by simulation-based testing and realworld end-user validation in order to increase the practical and perceived safety and trustworthiness of robotic assistants

Formal Verification of Astronaut-Rover Teams for Planetary Surface Operations

This paper describes an approach to assuring the reliability of autonomous systems for Astronaut-Rover (ASRO) teams using the formal verification of models in the Brahms multi-agent modelling language. Planetary surface rovers have proven essential to several manned and unmanned missions to the moon and Mars. The first rovers were tele- or manuallyoperated, but autonomous systems are increasingly being used to increase the effectiveness and range of rover operations on missions such as the NASA Mars Science Laboratory. It is anticipated that future manned missions to the moon and Mars will use autonomous rovers to assist astronauts during extravehicular activity (EVA), including science, technical and construction operations. These ASRO teams have the potential to significantly increase the safety and efficiency of surface operations. We describe a new Brahms model in which an autonomous rover may perform several different activities including assisting an astronaut during EVA. These activities compete for the autonomous rovers “attention’ and therefore the rover must decide which activity is currently the most important and engage in that activity. The Brahms model also includes an astronaut agent, which models an astronauts predicted behaviour during an EVA. The rover must also respond to the astronauts activities. We show how this Brahms model can be simulated using the Brahms integrated development environment. The model can then also be formally verified with respect to system requirements using the SPIN model checker, through automatic translation from Brahms to PROMELA (the input language for SPIN). We show that such formal verification can be used to determine that mission- and safety critical operations are conducted correctly, and therefore increase the reliability of autonomous systems for planetary rovers in ASRO teams

A synergistic and extensible framework for multi-agent system verification

Recently there has been a proliferation of tools and languages for modeling multi-agent systems (MAS). Verification tools, correspondingly, have been developed to check properties of these systems. Most MAS verification tools, however, have their own input language and often specialize in one verification technology, or only support checking a specific type of property. In this work we present an extensible framework that leverages mainstream verification tools to successfully reason about various types of properties. We describe the verification of models specified in the Brahms agent modeling language to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. We chose Brahms because it is used to model real instances of interactions between pilots, air-traffic controllers, and automated systems at NASA. Our framework takes as input a Brahms model along with a Java implementation of its semantics. We then use Java PathFinder to explore all possible behaviors of the model and, also, produce a generalized intermediate representation that encodes these behaviors. The intermediate representation is automatically transformed to the input language of mainstream model checkers, including PRISM, SPIN, and NuSMV allowing us to check different types of properties. We validate our approach on a model that contains key elements from the Air France Flight 447 acciden

A Roadmap to Pervasive Systems Verification

yesThe complexity of pervasive systems arises from the many different aspects that such systems possess. A typical pervasive system may be autonomous, distributed, concurrent and context-based, and may involve humans and robotic devices working together. If we wish to formally verify the behaviour of such systems, the formal methods for pervasive systems will surely also be complex. In this paper, we move towards being able to formally verify pervasive systems and outline our approach wherein we distinguish four distinct dimensions within pervasive system behaviour and utilise different, but appropriate, formal techniques for verifying each one.EPSR

A Formal Semantics for Brahms

Brahms is a multi-agent modelling, simulation and development environment devised by Sierhuis [1] and subsequently developed at NASA Ames Research Center. Brahms is a modelling language designed to model human activity using rational agents in order to represent people’s activities in real-world contexts, it also allows the representatio