Robotics

• robot swarms;
• robots (safely) interacting with humans, such as robots in the home, or in healthcare scenarios; and
• autonomous vehicles, though see here.

Some examples of publications related to these activities are given below.

Formal Verification of Swarm Robotics:   In collaboration with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory we are looking at the formal specification and verification of swarms of robots, impacting upon safety, reliability and effectiveness.

• Winfield, A. F. T., Sa, J., Fernández Gago, M-C., Dixon, C., and Fisher, M. On Formal Specification of Emergent Behaviours in Swarm Robotic Systems. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems 2(4):363-370, December 2005.
• Behdenna, A., Dixon, C., and Fisher, M. Deductive Verification of Simple Foraging Robotic Behaviours. International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics 2(4):604-643. Emerald Publishing, December 2009.
• Dixon, C., Winfield, A. F. T., and Fisher, M. Towards Temporal Verification of Emergent Behaviours in Swarm Robotic Systems. In Proceedings of Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS), Sheffield, UK, 2011.
• Konur, S., Dixon, C., and Fisher, M. Formal Verification of Probabilistic Swarm Behaviours. In Proc. 7th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS), 2010.

Safe Human-Robot Interaction:   In collaboration with the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the Univ. Hertfordshire, PARC in the USA, and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, we are looking at modelling and verifying safe interaction between humans and robots:

• Bordini, R., Fisher, M., and Sierhuis, M. Formal Verification of Human-Robot Teamwork. In Proc. 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. ACM Press, March 2009.
• Stocker, R., Sierhuis, M., Dennis, L., Dixon, C., and Fisher, M. A Formal Semantics for Brahms. In Proc. 12th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011.