A technique for designing robotic control systems based on Petri nets

Traditional techniques for designing the software of complex real-time control systems offer limited support for validating design before producing final code. The need of early validation of the design of control software is increasing, due to the growing complexity of the software components. This is especially the case of advanced robot controllers, due to the strict timing requirements of run time elaboration of information from exteroceptive sensors. The use of formal methods can increase the possibility of validating the design. This paper presents an approach for designing software for robotic controllers based on the use of a specialized notation formally defined by means of Petri nets (CONTROL NETS). The proposed notation is easy to use in the specific domain and it benefits from the validation techniques available for Petri nets. Benefits of CONTROL NETS, with respect to a traditional approach based on structured analysis techniques, are assessed through a case study.