The Landscape of Formal Methods for Robotics

20^th February 2019, 13:00
Marie Farrell

Abstract

Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety-critical; which make their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the correctness of, or provide sufficient evidence for the certification of, autonomous robotics. Formal methods for autonomous robotics has received some attention in the literature, but no resource provides a current overview. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work that systematically surveys the state-of-the-art in formal specification and verification for autonomous robotics, and focus on some of the individual subdomains to which formal methods are being applied. Specifically, we identify and categorise the challenges posed by, the formalisms aimed at, and the formal approaches for the specification and verification of autonomous robotic systems.