Managing safety and adaptability in Mobile Multi-Robot systems

In order to reduce human involvement in repetitive and dangerous tasks, innovative approaches are increasingly sought and explored. One of these approaches is represented by the Mobile Multi-Robot systems (MMRSs). The introduction of this kind of systems opens a collection of new business and societal opportunities, but also raises many new challenges. Such systems are exposed to various spheres of uncertainty, spanning from software and hardware variability of a single robot to the one associated to mission planning and execution in possibly unforeseeable environments. In this proposal, we aim to identify how to preserve safety while enabling adaptability at run-time in MMRSs. The objective is to provide a modelling framework based on a methodology which explicitly takes into account safety and adaptability properties at run-time. In order to reach our goal, we plan to use Model-driven engineering(MDE) methods and techniques. Motivated from positive results from the application of MDE in other domains (e.g. avionics, automotive and telecommunications) we postulate that many methods used in this methodology are also relevant for MMRSs. With our work, we expect to give a contribution towards the assurance of safety and adaptability properties for MMRSs in a dynamic run-time context.