Automated, Credible Autocoding of An Unmanned Aggressive Maneuvering Car Controller

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework for automatically generating verified control code for nonlinear car controllers, ensuring high-level functional guarantees and absence of runtime errors, demonstrated on an aggressive maneuvering vehicle.

Contribution

It extends an existing autocoding framework with new annotation features to handle nonlinear control systems and discusses scalability for automatic verification.

Findings

Successfully extended autocoder with new annotations for nonlinear systems

Generated verified control code for an aggressive maneuvering car

Discussed scalability and verification challenges of the approach

Abstract

This article describes the application of a credible autocoding framework for control systems towards a nonlinear car controller example. The framework generates code, along with guarantees of high level functional properties about the code that can be independently verified. These high-level functional properties not only serves as a certificate of good system behvaior but also can be used to guarantee the absence of runtime errors. In one of our previous works, we have constructed a prototype autocoder with proofs that demonstrates this framework in a fully automatic fashion for linear and quasi-nonlinear controllers. With the nonlinear car example, we propose to further extend the prototype's dataflow annotation language environment with with several new annotation symbols to enable the expression of general predicates and dynamical systems. We demonstrate manually how the new extensions to the prototype autocoder work on the car controller using the output language Matlab. Finally, we discuss the requirements and scalability issues of the automatic analysis and verification of the documented output code.