Safety verification of a fault tolerant reconfigurable autonomous goal-based robotic control system

Fault tolerance and safety verification of control systems are essential for the success of autonomous robotic systems. A control architecture called mission data system (MDS), developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, takes a goal-based control approach. In this paper, a method for converting goal network control programs into linear hybrid systems is developed. The linear hybrid system can then be verified for safety in the presence of failures using existing symbolic model checkers. An example task is simulated in MDS and successfully verified using HyTech, a symbolic model checking software for linear hybrid systems.