Towards Deductive Verification of Control Algorithms for Autonomous Marine Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal verification method combining numerical computation and proof assistants to verify safety properties of autonomous marine vehicle controllers with hybrid dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach integrating GNU/Octave and Isabelle for verifying hybrid control systems, addressing challenges in formal verification of autonomous vehicle controllers.

Findings

Successfully verified differential invariants of an autonomous marine vehicle.

Demonstrated effectiveness of the integrated verification approach.

Addresses hybrid system verification challenges in autonomous vehicle safety.

Abstract

The use of autonomous vehicles in real-world applications is often precluded by the difficulty of providing safety guarantees for their complex controllers. The simulation-based testing of these controllers cannot deliver sufficient safety guarantees, and the use of formal verification is very challenging due to the hybrid nature of the autonomous vehicles. Our work-in-progress paper introduces a formal verification approach that addresses this challenge by integrating the numerical computation of such a system (in GNU/Octave) with its hybrid system verification by means of a proof assistant (Isabelle). To show the effectiveness of our approach, we use it to verify differential invariants of an Autonomous Marine Vehicle with a controller switching between multiple modes.