From Requirements to Autonomous Flight: An Overview of the Monitoring ICAROUS Project

TL;DR

This paper presents Monitoring ICAROUS, a formal approach that generates runtime monitors from structured natural language requirements to verify autonomous aircraft operations during flight.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of formal requirement elicitation and runtime verification frameworks within the ICAROUS architecture for autonomous unmanned aircraft.

Findings

Successful translation of natural language requirements into temporal logic

Automated generation of runtime monitors for flight verification

Enhanced reliability of autonomous aircraft operations

Abstract

The Independent Configurable Architecture for Reliable Operations of Unmanned Systems (ICAROUS) is a software architecture incorporating a set of algorithms to enable autonomous operations of unmanned aircraft applications. This paper provides an overview of Monitoring ICAROUS, a project whose objective is to provide a formal approach to generating runtime monitors for autonomous systems from requirements written in a structured natural language. This approach integrates FRET, a formal requirement elicitation and authoring tool, and Copilot, a runtime verification framework. FRET is used to specify formal requirements in structured natural language. These requirements are translated into temporal logic formulae. Copilot is then used to generate executable runtime monitors from these temporal logic specifications. The generated monitors are directly integrated into ICAROUS to perform runtime verification during flight.