Towards Compositional Verification for Modular Robotic Systems

Rafael C. Cardoso
(The University of Manchester)
Louise A. Dennis
(The University of Manchester)
Marie Farrell
(The University of Manchester)
Michael Fisher
(The University of Manchester)
Matt Luckcuck
(The University of Manchester)

Software engineering of modular robotic systems is a challenging task, however, verifying that the developed components all behave as they should individually and as a whole presents its own unique set of challenges. In particular, distinct components in a modular robotic system often require different verification techniques to ensure that they behave as expected. Ensuring whole system consistency when individual components are verified using a variety of techniques and formalisms is difficult. This paper discusses how to use compositional verification to integrate the various verification techniques that are applied to modular robotic software, using a First-Order Logic (FOL) contract that captures each component's assumptions and guarantees. These contracts can then be used to guide the verification of the individual components, be it by testing or the use of a formal method. We provide an illustrative example of an autonomous robot used in remote inspection. We also discuss a way of defining confidence for the verification associated with each component.

In Matt Luckcuck and Marie Farrell: Proceedings Second Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2020), Virtual, 7th of December 2020, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 329, pp. 15–22.
Published: 3rd December 2020.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.329.2 bibtex PDF
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