AERoS: Assurance of Emergent Behaviour in Autonomous Robotic Swarms

The behaviours of a swarm are not explicitly engineered. Instead, they are an emergent consequence of the interactions of individual agents with each other and their environment. This emergent functionality poses a challenge to safety assurance. The main contribution of this paper is a process for the safety assurance of emergent behaviour in autonomous robotic swarms called AERoS, following the guidance on the Assurance of Machine Learning for use in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS). We explore our proposed process using a case study centred on a robot swarm operating a public cloakroom.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Soft Gripping: Specifying for Trustworthiness

Soft robotics is an emerging technology in which engineers create flexible devices for use in a variety of applications. In order to advance the wide adoption of soft robots, ensuring their trustworthiness is essential; if soft robots are not trusted, they will not be used to their full potential. In order to demonstrate trustworthiness, a specification needs to be formulated to define what is trustworthy. However, even for soft robotic grippers, which is one of the most mature areas in soft robotics, the soft robotics community has so far given very little attention to formulating specifications. In this work, we discuss the importance of developing specifications during development of soft robotic systems, and present an extensive example specification for a soft gripper for pick-and-place tasks for grocery items. The proposed specification covers both functional and non-functional requirements, such as reliability, safety, adaptability, predictability, ethics, and regulations. We also highlight the need to promote verifiability as a first-class objective in the design of a soft gripper.Comment: Updated the Standards subsection of paper. 9 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 34 reference

On Specifying for Trustworthiness

As autonomous systems (AS) increasingly become part of our daily lives, ensuring their trustworthiness is crucial. In order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of an AS, we first need to specify what is required for an AS to be considered trustworthy. This roadmap paper identifies key challenges for specifying for trustworthiness in AS, as identified during the "Specifying for Trustworthiness" workshop held as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme. We look across a range of AS domains with consideration of the resilience, trust, functionality, verifiability, security, and governance and regulation of AS and identify some of the key specification challenges in these domains. We then highlight the intellectual challenges that are involved with specifying for trustworthiness in AS that cut across domains and are exacerbated by the inherent uncertainty involved with the environments in which AS need to operate.Comment: Accepted version of paper. 13 pages, 1 table, 1 figur

Model Checking Goal-Oriented Requirements for Self-Adaptive Systems

Abstract—To deal with the increasing complexity and uncertaint

An Integrated Eclipse Plug-In for Engineering and Implementing Self-Adaptive Systems

A highly decentralized system of autonomous service components consists of multiple and possibly interacting feedback loops. These loops can be organized into a variety of architectural patterns. Although several authors have addressed the need to make feedback loops first-class entities, little attention has been given to providing solid tool support for their engineering and implementation. In this paper, we present SimSOTA - an integrated Eclipse plug-in tool to architect, engineer and implement self-adaptive systems based on our feedback loop-based approach. SimSOTA adopts model-driven development to model and simulate complex self-adaptive architectural patterns, and to automate the generation of Java-based implementation code for the patterns. The approach is validated using a case study in cooperative electric vehicles