Formal Specification and Verification of Autonomous Robotic Systems: A Survey
It provides a systematic overview for researchers and practitioners in robotics and formal methods, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing literature without introducing new methods.
The paper surveys the state-of-the-art in formal specification and verification for autonomous robotic systems, identifying challenges, formalisms, and approaches to address the insufficiency of testing and simulation for ensuring correctness and certification.
Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety-critical; this makes their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the correctness of, or provide sufficient evidence for the certification of, autonomous robotics. Formal methods for autonomous robotics has received some attention in the literature, but no resource provides a current overview. This paper systematically surveys the state-of-the-art in formal specification and verification for autonomous robotics. Specially, it identifies and categorises the challenges posed by, the formalisms aimed at, and the formal approaches for the specification and verification of autonomous robotics.