Toward a Correct-and-Scalable Verification of Concurrent Robotic Systems: Insights on Formalisms and Tools

Formal verification of robotic functional components is extremely important. Indeed, with the growing involvement of autonomous systems in everyday life, we may no longer rely on classical testing and simulation to establish our trust in them. However, the formalization of such systems is challenging considering the various existing formalisms and their respective advantages/drawbacks. One may express more easily in one formalism and verify more easily in another depending on the aspects/properties they are modeling/verifying. Furthermore, both the reusability of the formalization and the scalability of the obtained formal models are crucial elements in the verification process. In this paper, we present modeling concurrency aspects of robotic functional components in Time Petri Nets, Timed Automata and Timed Automata extended with urgencies. Formal models are automatically generated and verification is conducted on each of them. Both the expressiveness of the formalisms and scalability of the obtained models are evaluated and future directions are consequently outlined.