Shane Windsor

Dhaminda B. Abeywickrama, Amel Bennaceur, Greg Chance et al.

As autonomous systems (AS) increasingly become part of our daily lives, ensuring their trustworthiness is crucial. In order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of an AS, we first need to specify what is required for an AS to be considered trustworthy. This roadmap paper identifies key challenges for specifying for trustworthiness in AS, as identified during the "Specifying for Trustworthiness" workshop held as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme. We look across a range of AS domains with consideration of the resilience, trust, functionality, verifiability, security, and governance and regulation of AS and identify some of the key specification challenges in these domains. We then highlight the intellectual challenges that are involved with specifying for trustworthiness in AS that cut across domains and are exacerbated by the inherent uncertainty involved with the environments in which AS need to operate.

Dhaminda B. Abeywickrama, James Wilson, Suet Lee et al.

The behaviours of a swarm are not explicitly engineered. Instead, they are an emergent consequence of the interactions of individual agents with each other and their environment. This emergent functionality poses a challenge to safety assurance. The main contribution of this paper is a process for the safety assurance of emergent behaviour in autonomous robotic swarms called AERoS, following the guidance on the Assurance of Machine Learning for use in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS). We explore our proposed process using a case study centred on a robot swarm operating a public cloakroom.

Dhaminda B. Abeywickrama, Nguyen Hao Le, Greg Chance et al.

Soft robotics is an emerging technology in which engineers create flexible devices for use in a variety of applications. In order to advance the wide adoption of soft robots, ensuring their trustworthiness is essential; if soft robots are not trusted, they will not be used to their full potential. In order to demonstrate trustworthiness, a specification needs to be formulated to define what is trustworthy. However, even for soft robotic grippers, which is one of the most mature areas in soft robotics, the soft robotics community has so far given very little attention to formulating specifications. In this work, we discuss the importance of developing specifications during development of soft robotic systems, and present an extensive example specification for a soft gripper for pick-and-place tasks for grocery items. The proposed specification covers both functional and non-functional requirements, such as reliability, safety, adaptability, predictability, ethics, and regulations. We also highlight the need to promote verifiability as a first-class objective in the design of a soft gripper.

Haichuan Li, Ziang Zhao, Ziniu Wu et al.

Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data collection less efficient. To address this challenge, an aerial platform with bio-inspired behaviour facilitated by a bio-inspired mechanism is proposed. The platform spends minimum energy during data collection by perching on tree branches. A raptor inspired vision algorithm is used to locate a tree trunk, and then a horizontal branch on which the platform can perch is identified. A tendon-driven mechanism inspired by bat claws which requires energy only for actuation, secures the platform onto the branch using the mechanism's passive compliance. Experimental results show that the mechanism can perform perching on branches ranging from 30 mm to 80 mm in diameter. The real-world tests validated the system's ability to select and adapt to target points, and it is expected to be useful in complex forest ecosystems.