Synthesis of Safety Rules for Active Monitoring: Application to an Airport Light Measurement Robot

Safety-critical autonomous systems, like robots working in collaboration with humans, are about to be used in diverse environments such as industry but also public spaces or hospitals. Those systems evolve in complex and dynamic environments and are exposed to a wide variety of hazards. Several techniques may be used to ensure that their misbehavior cannot cause unacceptable damage or harm. One of them is active safety monitoring. A safety monitor is a component responsible for maintaining the system in a safe state despite the occurrence of hazardous situations. In this paper, we study the introduction of safety monitoring into an airport light measurement robot. The specification of the monitor follows a principled approach that starts with a hazard analysis and ends with a set of safety rules synthesized based on formal methods. This study illustrates the benefits of the approach, and shows the impact of safety on the development of an autonomous system.