Robotics
We are interested in the programming, formal verification and safety of
robotic systems, specifically:
- 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.