RTLola Cleared for Take-Off: Monitoring Autonomous Aircraft
This addresses safety-critical monitoring for autonomous aircraft, with potential applications in logistics and disaster recovery, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RTLola methods.
The authors tackled the problem of ensuring safety in autonomous aircraft by developing a dynamic monitoring framework using the RTLola specification language, which resulted in highly efficient, parallelized monitors with formal guarantees on noninterference.
The autonomous control of unmanned aircraft is a highly safety-critical domain with great economic potential in a wide range of application areas, including logistics, agriculture, civil engineering, and disaster recovery. We report on the development of a dynamic monitoring framework for the DLR ARTIS (Autonomous Rotorcraft Testbed for Intelligent Systems) family of unmanned aircraft based on the formal specification language RTLola. RTLola is a stream-based specification language for real-time properties. An RTLola specification of hazardous situations and system failures is statically analyzed in terms of consistency and resource usage and then automatically translated into an FPGA-based monitor. Our approach leads to highly efficient, parallelized monitors with formal guarantees on the noninterference of the monitor with the normal operation of the autonomous system.