A Verification Methodology for Safety Assurance of Robotic Autonomous Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive verification workflow for ensuring the safety of autonomous agricultural robots throughout their development, emphasizing hazard analysis, formal modeling, and safety property verification.

Contribution

It presents a novel, systematic methodology for safety verification of autonomous robots, covering the entire development lifecycle from hazard analysis to runtime verification.

Findings

Effective safety verification of autonomous robots demonstrated in field tests

Early identification of design issues improves safety and reliability

Formal safety property verification ensures compliance with safety requirements

Abstract

Autonomous robots deployed in shared human environments, such as agricultural settings, require rigorous safety assurance to meet both functional reliability and regulatory compliance. These systems must operate in dynamic, unstructured environments, interact safely with humans, and respond effectively to a wide range of potential hazards. This paper presents a verification workflow for the safety assurance of an autonomous agricultural robot, covering the entire development life-cycle, from concept study and design to runtime verification. The outlined methodology begins with a systematic hazard analysis and risk assessment to identify potential risks and derive corresponding safety requirements. A formal model of the safety controller is then developed to capture its behaviour and verify that the controller satisfies the specified safety properties with respect to these requirements. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a field robot operating in an agricultural setting. The results show that the methodology can be effectively used to verify safety-critical properties and facilitate the early identification of design issues, contributing to the development of safer robots and autonomous systems.