Towards Deductive Verification of Control Algorithms for Autonomous Marine Vehicles
This work addresses safety verification for autonomous marine vehicles, which is crucial for real-world deployment, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of providing safety guarantees for autonomous marine vehicle controllers by introducing a formal verification approach that integrates numerical computation with hybrid system verification, demonstrating its effectiveness by verifying differential invariants for a controller with multiple modes.
The use of autonomous vehicles in real-world applications is often precluded by the difficulty of providing safety guarantees for their complex controllers. The simulation-based testing of these controllers cannot deliver sufficient safety guarantees, and the use of formal verification is very challenging due to the hybrid nature of the autonomous vehicles. Our work-in-progress paper introduces a formal verification approach that addresses this challenge by integrating the numerical computation of such a system (in GNU/Octave) with its hybrid system verification by means of a proof assistant (Isabelle). To show the effectiveness of our approach, we use it to verify differential invariants of an Autonomous Marine Vehicle with a controller switching between multiple modes.