Systematic and Realistic Testing in Simulation of Control Code for Robots in Collaborative Human-Robot Interactions
This addresses safety assurance for robotic assistants in industries like manufacturing and home care, but it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation and verification methods.
The paper tackled the problem of verifying safety and functionality in robotic systems for collaborative human-robot interactions by proposing Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV) with a two-tiered test generation approach, achieving a very high degree of automation in simulation-based verification.
Industries such as flexible manufacturing and home care will be transformed by the presence of robotic assistants. Assurance of safety and functional soundness for these robotic systems will require rigorous verification and validation. We propose testing in simulation using Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV) to guide the testing process in an automatic and systematic way. We use a two-tiered test generation approach, where abstract test sequences are computed first and then concretized (e.g., data and variables are instantiated), to reduce the complexity of the test generation problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a testbench for robotic code, running in ROS-Gazebo, that implements an object handover as part of a human-robot interaction (HRI) task. Tests are generated to stimulate the robot's code in a realistic manner, through stimulating the human, environment, sensors, and actuators in simulation. We compare the merits of unconstrained, constrained and model-based test generation in achieving thorough exploration of the code under test, and interesting combinations of human-robot interactions. Our results show that CDV combined with systematic test generation achieves a very high degree of automation in simulation-based verification of control code for robots in HRI.