Telemetry downlink interfaces and level-zero processing

The technical areas being investigated are as follows: (1) processing of space to ground data frames; (2) parallel architecture performance studies; and (3) parallel programming techniques. Additionally, the University administrative details and the technical liaison between New Mexico State University and Goddard Space Flight Center are addressed

Motion session types for robotic interactions

Robotics applications involve programming concurrent components synchronising through messages while simultaneously executing motion primitives that control the state of the physical world. Today, these applications are typically programmed in low-level imperative programming languages which provide little support for abstraction or reasoning. We present a unifying programming model for concurrent message-passing systems that additionally control the evolution of physical state variables, together with a compositional reasoning framework based on multiparty session types. Our programming model combines message-passing concurrent processes with motion primitives. Processes represent autonomous components in a robotic assembly, such as a cart or a robotic arm, and they synchronise via discrete messages as well as via motion primitives. Continuous evolution of trajectories under the action of controllers is also modelled by motion primitives, which operate in global, physical time. We use multiparty session types as specifications to orchestrate discrete message-passing concurrency and continuous flow of trajectories. A global session type specifies the communication protocol among the components with joint motion primitives. A projection from a global type ensures that jointly executed actions at end-points are communication safe and deadlock-free, i.e., session-typed components do not get stuck. Together, these checks provide a compositional verification methodology for assemblies of robotic components with respect to concurrency invariants such as a progress property of communications as well as dynamic invariants such as absence of collision. We have implemented our core language and, through initial experiments, have shown how multiparty session types can be used to specify and compositionally verify robotic systems implemented on top of off-the-shelf and custom hardware using standard robotics application libraries

Motivating Time as a First Class Entity

In hard real-time applications, programs must not only be functionally correct but must also meet timing constraints. Unfortunately, little work has been done to allow a high-level incorporation of timing constraints into distributed real-time programs. Instead the programmer is required to ensure system timing through a complicated synchronization process or through low-level programming, making it difficult to create and modify programs. In this report, we describe six features that must be integrated into a high level language and underlying support system in order to promote time to a first class position in distributed real-time programming systems: expressibility of time, real-time communication, enforcement of timing constraints, fault tolerance to violations of constraints, ensuring distributed system state consistency in the time domain, and static timing verification. For each feature we describe what is required, what related work had been performed, and why this work does not adequately provide sufficient capabilities for distributed real-time programming. We then briefly outline an integrated approach to provide these six features using a high-level distributed programming language and system tools such as compilers, operating systems, and timing analyzers to enforce and verify timing constraints

Timed model-based programming : executable specifications for robust mission-critical sequences

Thesis (Sc. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-204).There is growing demand for high-reliability embedded systems that operate robustly and autonomously in the presence of tight real-time constraints. For robotic spacecraft, robust plan execution is essential during time-critical mission sequences, due to the very short time available for recovery from anomalies. Traditional approaches to encoding these sequences can lead to brittle behavior under off-nominal execution conditions, due to the high level of complexity in the control specification required to manage the complex spacecraft system interactions. This work describes timed model-based programming, a novel approach for encoding and robustly executing mission-critical spacecraft sequences. The timed model-based programming approach addresses the issues of sequence complexity and unanticipated low-level system interactions by allowing control programs to directly read or write "hidden" states of the plant, that is, states that are not directly observable or controllable. It is then the responsibility of the program's execution kernel to map between hidden states and the plant sensors and control variables. This mapping is performed automatically by a deductive controller using a common-sense plant model, freeing the programmer from the error-prone process of reasoning through a complex set of interactions under a range of possible failure situations. Time is central to the execution of mission-critical sequences; a robust executive must consider time in its control and behavior models, in addition to reactively managing complexity.(cont.) In timed model-based programming, control programs express goals and constraints in terms of both system state and time. Plant models capture the underlying behavior of the system components, including nominal and off-nominal modes, probabilistic transitions, and timed effects such as state transition latency. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, a semantic specification of the timed model-based programming approach is provided. The execution semantics of a timed model-based program are defined in terms of legal state evolutions of a physical plant, represented as a factored Partially Observable Semi-Markov Decision Process. The second contribution is the definition of graphical and textual languages for encoding timed control programs and plant models. The adoption of a visual programming paradigm allows timed model-based programs to be specified and readily inspected by the systems engineers in charge of designing the mission-critical sequences. The third contribution is the development of a Timed Model-based Executive, which takes as input a timed control program and executes it, using timed plant models to track states, diagnose faults and generate control actions. The Timed Model-based Executive has been implemented and demonstrated on a representative spacecraft scenario for Mars entry, descent and landing.by Michel Donald Ingham.Sc.D

Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible

Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin

Specification and Verification of Timing Properties in Interoperable Medical Systems

To support the dynamic composition of various devices/apps into a medical system at point-of-care, a set of communication patterns to describe the communication needs of devices has been proposed. To address timing requirements, each pattern breaks common timing properties into finer ones that can be enforced locally by the components. Common timing requirements for the underlying communication substrate are derived from these local properties. The local properties of devices are assured by the vendors at the development time. Although organizations procure devices that are compatible in terms of their local properties and middleware, they may not operate as desired. The latency of the organization network interacts with the local properties of devices. To validate the interaction among the timing properties of components and the network, we formally specify such systems in Timed Rebeca. We use model checking to verify the derived timing requirements of the communication substrate in terms of the network and device models. We provide a set of templates as a guideline to specify medical systems in terms of the formal model of patterns. A composite medical system using several devices is subject to state-space explosion. We extend the reduction technique of Timed Rebeca based on the static properties of patterns. We prove that our reduction is sound and show the applicability of our approach in reducing the state space by modeling two clinical scenarios made of several instances of patterns

Temporal Logic Motion Planning

In this paper, a critical review on temporal logic motion planning is presented. The review paper aims to address the following problems: (a) In a realistic situation, the motion planning problem is carried out in real-time, in a dynamic, uncertain and ever-changing environment, and (b) The accomplishment of high-level specification tasks which are more than just the traditional planning problem (i.e., start at initial state A and go to the goal state B) are considered. The use of theory of computation and formal methods, tools and techniques present a promising direction of research in solving motion planning problems that are influenced by high-level specification of complex tasks. The review, therefore, focuses only on those papers that use the aforementioned tools and techniques to solve a motion planning problem. A proposed robust platform that deals with the complexity of more expressive temporal logics is also presented.Defence Science Journal, 2010, 60(1), pp.23-38, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.60.9

Modeling and formal verification of probabilistic reconfigurable systems

In this thesis, we propose a new approach for formal modeling and verification of adaptive probabilistic systems. Dynamic reconfigurable systems are the trend of all future technological systems, such as flight control systems, vehicle electronic systems, and manufacturing systems. In order to meet user and environmental requirements, such a dynamic reconfigurable system has to actively adjust its configuration at run-time by modifying its components and connections, while changes are detected in the internal/external execution environment. On the other hand, these changes may violate the memory usage, the required energy and the concerned real-time constraints since the behavior of the system is unpredictable. It might also make the system's functions unavailable for some time and make potential harm to human life or large financial investments. Thus, updating a system with any new configuration requires that the post reconfigurable system fully satisfies the related constraints. We introduce GR-TNCES formalism for the optimal functional and temporal specification of probabilistic reconfigurable systems under resource constraints. It enables the optimal specification of a probabilistic, energetic and memory constraints of such a system. To formally verify the correctness and the safety of such a probabilistic system specification, and the non-violation of its properties, an automatic transformation from GR-TNCES models into PRISM models is introduced. Moreover, a new approach XCTL is also proposed to formally verify reconfigurable systems. It enables the formal certification of uncompleted and reconfigurable systems. A new version of the software ZIZO is also proposed to model, simulate and verify such GR-TNCES model. To prove its relevance, the latter was applied to case studies; it was used to model and simulate the behavior of an IPV4 protocol to prevent the energy and memory resources violation. It was also used to optimize energy consumption of an automotive skid conveyor.In dieser Arbeit wird ein neuer Ansatz zur formalen Modellierung und Verifikation dynamisch rekonfigurierbarer Systeme vorgestellt. Dynamische rekonfigurierbare Systeme sind in vielen aktuellen und zukünftigen Anwendungen, wie beispielsweise Flugsteuerungssystemen, Fahrzeugelektronik und Fertigungssysteme zu finden. Diese Systeme weisen ein probabilistisches, adaptives Verhalten auf. Um die Benutzer- und Umgebungsbedingungen kontinuierlich zu erfüllen, muss ein solches System seine Konfiguration zur Laufzeit aktiv anpassen, indem es seine Komponenten, Verbindungen zwischen Komponenten und seine Daten modifiziert (adaptiv), sobald Änderungen in der internen oder externen Ausführungsumgebung erkannt werden (probabilistisch). Diese Anpassungen dürfen Beschränkungen bei der Speichernutzung, der erforderlichen Energie und bestehende Echtzeitbedingungen nicht verletzen. Eine nicht geprüfte Rekonfiguration könnte dazu führen, dass die Funktionen des Systems für einige Zeit nicht verfügbar wären und potenziell menschliches Leben gefährdet würde oder großer finanzieller Schaden entstünde. Somit erfordert das Aktualisieren eines Systems mit einer neuen Konfiguration, dass das rekonfigurierte System die zugehörigen Beschränkungen vollständig einhält. Um dies zu überprüfen, wird in dieser Arbeit der GR-TNCES-Formalismus, eine Erweiterung von Petrinetzen, für die optimale funktionale und zeitliche Spezifikation probabilistischer rekonfigurierbarer Systeme unter Ressourcenbeschränkungen vorgeschlagen. Die entstehenden Modelle sollen über probabilistische model checking verifiziert werden. Dazu eignet sich die etablierte Software PRISM. Um die Verifikation zu ermöglichen wird in dieser Arbeit ein Verfahren zur Transformation von GR-TNCES-Modellen in PRISM-Modelle beschrieben. Eine neu eingeführte Logik (XCTL) erlaubt zudem die einfache Beschreibung der zu prüfenden Eigenschaften. Die genannten Schritte wurden in einer Softwareumgebung für den automatisierten Entwurf, die Simulation und die formale Verifikation (durch eine automatische Transformation nach PRISM) umgesetzt. Eine Fallstudie zeigt die Anwendung des Verfahren

tBurton: A Divide and Conquer Temporal Planner

Planning for and controlling a network of interacting devices requires a planner that accounts for the automatic timed transitions of devices while meeting deadlines and achieving durative goals. For example, a planner for an imaging satellite with a camera intolerant of exhaust would need to determine that opening a valve causes a chain reaction that ignites the engine, and thus needs to shield its camera. While planners exist that support deadlines and durative goals, currently, no planners can handle automatic timed transitions. We present tBurton, a temporal planner that supports these features while additionally producing a temporally least-commitment plan. tBurton uses a divide and conquer approach: dividing the problem using causal-graph decomposition and conquering each factor with heuristic forward search. The `sub-plans' from each factor are unified in a conflict directed search, guided by the causal graph structure. We describe why tBurton is fast and efficient and present its efficacy on benchmarks from the International Planning Competition