Towards automatic verification of autonomous systems

While autonomous systems offer great promise in terms of capability and flexibility, their reliability is particularly hard to assess. This paper describes research to apply formal verification methods to languages used to develop autonomy software. In particular, we describe tools that automatically convert autonomy software into formal models that are then verified using model checking. This approach has been applied to MPL code for the Livingstone fault diagnosis system and to TDL task descriptions for mobile robot systems. Our long-term objective is to create tools that enable engineers and roboticists to use formal verification as part of the normal software development cycle.