Related papers: Autonomous Robotic Swarms: A Corroborative Approac…
An active approach to fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to achieve long-term autonomy. Previous efforts have focused on responding to spontaneous electro-mechanical faults and failures. However, many faults occur gradually over…
Autonomous systems must sustain justified confidence in their correctness and safety across their operational lifecycle-from design and deployment through post-deployment evolution. Traditional assurance methods often separate…
Coordination of movement and configuration in robotic swarms is a challenging endeavor. Deciding when and where each individual robot must move is a computationally complex problem. The challenge is further exacerbated by difficulties…
Many swarm robotics tasks consist of multiple conflicting objectives. This research proposes a multi-objective evolutionary neural network approach to developing controllers for swarms of robots. The swarm robot controllers are trained in a…
Swarm and field robotics face significant barriers to real-world validation due to the high cost and development time to deploy hardware. This paper introduces the ``Bionic Swarm,'' a novel system that lowers these barriers by abstracting…
Challenges related to automated driving are no longer focused on just the construction of such automated vehicles (AVs), but in assuring the safety of their operation. Recent advances in Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving have motivated…
This paper presents a formal theory of verification and validation (V&V) within systems engineering, grounded in the axiom that V&V are fundamentally knowledge-building activities. Using dynamic epistemic modal logic, we develop precise…
Safety and mission performance validation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is a major challenge. In this paper we describe a methodology for constructing and applying assertion checks to validate the behaviour of an AV operating either in…
Safety and reliability play a crucial role when designing Robotic Autonomous Systems (RAS). Early consideration of hazards, risks and mitigation actions -- already in the concept study phase -- are important steps in building a solid…
Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the…
Animal swarms displaying a variety of typical flocking patterns would not exist without underlying safe, optimal and stable dynamics of the individuals. The emergence of these universal patterns can be efficiently reconstructed with…
Bearing measurements,as the most common modality in nature, have recently gained traction in multi-robot systems to enhance mutual localization and swarm collaboration. Despite their advantages, challenges such as sensory noise, obstacle…
The increasing use of deep neural networks for safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving and flight control, raises concerns about their safety and reliability. Formal verification can address these concerns by guaranteeing…
Safety verification of robot applications is extremely challenging due to the complexity of the environment that a robot typically operates in. Formal verification with model-checking provides guarantees but it may often take too long or…
In the domain of unmanned vehicles, autonomous robotic swarms promise to deliver increased efficiency and collective autonomy. How these swarms will operate in the future, and what communication requirements and operational boundaries will…
Robotic systems are multi-dimensional entities, combining both hardware and software, that are heavily dependent on, and influenced by, interactions with the real world. They can be variously categorised as embedded, cyberphysical,…
Autonomous systems have gained an important role in many industry domains and are beginning to change everyday life. However, due to dynamically emerging applications and often proprietary constraints, there is a lack of information about…
Robotic systems are widely used to interact with humans or to perform critical tasks. As a result, it is imperative to provide guarantees about their behavior. Due to the modularity and complexity of robotic systems, their design and…
When individual robots have limited sensing capabilities or insufficient fault tolerance, it becomes necessary for multiple robots to form teams during exploration, thereby increasing the collective observation range and reliability.…
Emergent properties in distributed systems arise due to timing unpredictability; asynchronous state evolution within each sub-system may lead the macro-system to faulty meta-states. Empirical validation of correctness is often prohibitively…