Use and usability of software verification methods to detect behaviour interference when teaching an assistive home companion robot: A proof-of-concept study

© 2021 Kheng Lee Koay et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/When studying the use of assistive robots in home environments, and especially how such robots can be personalised to meet the needs of the resident, key concerns are issues relating to behaviour verification, behaviour interference and safety. Here, personalisation refers to the teaching of new robot behaviours by both technical and non-technical end users. In this article we consider the issue of behaviour interference caused by situations where newly taught robot behaviours may affect or be affected by existing behaviours and thus, those behaviours will not or might not ever be executed. We focus in particular on how such situations can be detected and presented to the user. We describe the human-robot behaviour teaching system that we developed as well as the formal behaviour checking methods used. The online use of behaviour checking is demonstrated, based on static analysis of behaviours during the operation of the robot, and evaluated in a user study. We conducted a proof of concept human-robot interaction study with an autonomous, multi-purpose robot operating within a smart home environment. Twenty participants individually taught the robot behaviours according to instructions they were given, some of which caused interference with other behaviours. A mechanism for detecting behaviour interference provided feedback to participants and suggestions on how to resolve those conflicts. We assessed the participants’ views on detected interference as reported by the behaviour teaching system. Results indicate that interference warnings given to participants during teaching provoked an understanding of the issue. We did not find a significant influence of participants’ technical background. These results highlight a promising path towards verification and validation of assistive home companion robots that allow end-user personalisation.Peer reviewe

Formal verification of robot movements - a case study on home service robot shr100

Abstract — Home service robots have received much attention from both academia and industry because home service robots have wide range of potential applications such as home security, cleaning, etc. The robots need to add or update services frequently according to the changing needs of human users. Furthermore, reactive nature of the robots add complexity to develop robot applications. These challenges raise safety issues seriously. Considering that safe operation of home service robots is crucial, current practice of validating robot applications is, however, not mature enough for wide deployment of home service robots. In this paper, we present our experience of developing and formally verifying discrete control software of Samsung Home Robot (SHR) using Esterel. We give a brief background on Esterel, then illuminate our result in formally verifying stopping behavior of SHR. Through the verification, we could detect and solve a feature interaction problem which caused the robot not to stop when a user commanded the robot to stop. Index Terms — robot programming, formal verification, discrete controller synthesis I

Formal Verification of the Robot Movements- a Case Study on Home Service Robot SHR100

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