Generating Safe Autonomous Decision-Making in ROS

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal method for ensuring safety in autonomous decision-making within ROS, transitioning from static to runtime verification to enhance safety assurance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining static and runtime verification for safe autonomous decision-making in ROS systems.

Findings

Improved static verification for multi-goal multi-agent decision-making.

Transition framework from static to runtime verification.

Initial implementation shows promising safety results.

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used framework for building robotic systems. It offers a wide variety of reusable packages and a pattern for new developments. It is up to developers how to combine these elements and integrate them with decision-making for autonomous behavior. The feature of such decision-making that is in general valued the most is safety assurance. In this research preview, we present a formal approach for generating safe autonomous decision-making in ROS. We first describe how to improve our existing static verification approach to verify multi-goal multi-agent decision-making. After that, we describe how to transition from the improved static verification approach to the proposed runtime verification approach. An initial implementation of this research proposal yields promising results.