Approaches for Software Verification of an Emergency Recovery System for Micro Air Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal verification approach for an emergency recovery system's embedded software in Micro Air Vehicles, demonstrating its effectiveness and novelty in resource-constrained environments.

Contribution

It introduces a formal verification method for embedded software in MAV recovery systems, achieving the first verified parachute system of its kind.

Findings

Successfully verified the entire embedded code using bounded model checking.

The verified system outperforms existing solutions in operational tests.

Demonstrated that careful abstraction enables verification on microprocessors.

Abstract

This paper describes the development and verification of a competitive parachute system for Micro Air Vehicles, in particular focusing on verification of the embedded software. We first introduce the overall solution including a system level failure analysis, and then show how we minimized the influence of faulty software. This paper demonstrates that with careful abstraction and little overapproximation, the entire code running on a microprocessor can be verified using bounded model checking, and that this is a useful approach for resource-constrained embedded systems. he resulting Emergency Recovery System is to our best knowledge the first of its kind that passed formal verification, and furthermore is superior to all other existing solutions (including commercially available ones) from an operational point of view.