Formal Verification of Complex Robotic Systems on Resource-Constrained Platforms

Abstract

Software constitutes a major part of the development of robotic and autonomous systems and is critical to their successful deployment in our everyday life. Robotic software must thus run and perform as specified. Since most of these systems are used in a hard real-time context, the schedulability of their tasks is a crucial property. In this work, we propose to use formal methods to check whether the tasks of a robotic application are schedulable with respect to a given hardware platform. For this, we automatically translate functional components specified in GenoM into FIACRE, a formal language for timed systems. The generated models integrate realistic real-time schedulers based on the FCFS and the SJF cooperative policies. We use then the model-checker TINA to assert schedulability properties. We carry out experiments on a real robotic system, namely a quadcopter flight controller. We demonstrate that, on its actual hardware, schedulability properties can be formally expressed and verified. We give examples on how we can check other important behavioral and timed properties on the same synthesized models.