734 research outputs found
An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds
Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular
in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a
digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform
or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal
methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems,
in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a
formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital
crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We
further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated
formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure
Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour
Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and
difficult. However, the idea of having an additional `governor' that assesses
options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is
well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a
`consequence engine' that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then
applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing,
it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually
taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification
approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of
its ethical decision-making.Comment: Presented at the 1st International Workshop on AI and Ethics, Sunday
25th January 2015, Hill Country A, Hyatt Regency Austin. Will appear in the
workshop proceedings published by AAA
Agent Based Approaches to Engineering Autonomous Space Software
Current approaches to the engineering of space software such as satellite
control systems are based around the development of feedback controllers using
packages such as MatLab's Simulink toolbox. These provide powerful tools for
engineering real time systems that adapt to changes in the environment but are
limited when the controller itself needs to be adapted.
We are investigating ways in which ideas from temporal logics and agent
programming can be integrated with the use of such control systems to provide a
more powerful layer of autonomous decision making. This paper will discuss our
initial approaches to the engineering of such systems.Comment: 3 pages, 1 Figure, Formal Methods in Aerospac
On proactive, transparent and verifiable ethical reasoning for robots
Previous work on ethical machine reasoning has largely been theoretical, and where such systems have been implemented it has in general been only initial proofs of principle. Here we address the question of desirable attributes for such systems to improve their real world utility, and how controllers with these attributes might be implemented. We propose that ethically-critical machine reasoning should be proactive, transparent and verifiable. We describe an architecture where the ethical reasoning is handled by a separate layer, augmenting a typical layered control architecture, ethically moderating the robot actions. It makes use of a simulation-based internal model, and supports proactive, transparent and verifiable ethical reasoning. To do so the reasoning component of the ethical layer uses our Python based Beliefs, Desires, Intentions (BDI) implementation. The declarative logic structure of BDI facilitates both transparency, through logging of the reasoning cycle, and formal verification methods. To prove the principles of our approach we use a case study implementation to experimentally demonstrate its operation. Importantly, it is the first such robot controller where the ethical machine reasoning has been formally verified
Updating Action Descriptions and Plans for Cognitive Agents
Extended Abstract and Poster PresentationPostprin
A Compositional Approach to Verifying Modular Robotic Systems
Robotic systems used in safety-critical industrial situations often rely on
modular software architectures, and increasingly include autonomous components.
Verifying that these modular robotic systems behave as expected requires
approaches that can cope with, and preferably take advantage of, this inherent
modularity. This paper describes a compositional approach to specifying the
nodes in robotic systems built using the Robotic Operating System (ROS), where
each node is specified using First-Order Logic (FOL) assume-guarantee contracts
that link the specification to the ROS implementation. We introduce inference
rules that facilitate the composition of these node-level contracts to derive
system-level properties. We also present a novel Domain-Specific Language, the
ROS Contract Language, which captures a node's FOL specification and links this
contract to its implementation. RCL contracts can be automatically translated,
by our tool Vanda, into executable monitors; which we use to verify the
contracts at runtime. We illustrate our approach through the specification and
verification of an autonomous rover engaged in the remote inspection of a
nuclear site, and finish with smaller examples that illustrate other useful
features of our framework.Comment: Version submitted to RA
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 āattentionā 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
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