Assured Mission Adaptation of UAVs

The design of systems that can change their behaviour to account for scenarios that were not foreseen at design time remains an open challenge. In this paper we propose an approach for adaptation of mobile robot missions that is not constrained to a predefined set of mission evolutions. We propose applying the MORPH adaptive software architecture to UAVs and show how controller synthesis can be used both to guarantee correct transitioning from the old to the new mission goals while architectural reconfiguration to include new software actuators and sensors if necessary. The architecture brings together architectural concepts that are commonplace in robotics such as temporal planning, discrete, hybrid and continuous control layers together with architectural concepts from adaptive systems such as runtime models and runtime synthesis. We validate the architecture flying several missions taken from the robotic literature for different real and simulated UAVs.

Hybrid Control from Scratch: A Design Methodology for Assured Robotic Missions

Robotic research over the last decades have lead us to different architectures to automatically synthesise discrete event controllers and implement these motion and task plans in real-world robot scenarios. However, these architectures usually build on existing robot hardware, generating as a result solutions that are influenced and/or restricted in their design by the available capabilities and sensors. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a design methodology that, given a specific domain of application, allowed us to build the first end-to-end implementation of an autonomous robot system that uses discrete event controller synthesis to generate assured mission plans. We validate this robot system in several missions of our target domain of application.

Iterator-Based Temporal Logic Task Planning

Temporal logic task planning for robotic systems suffers from state explosion when specifications involve large numbers of discrete locations. We provide a novel approach, particularly suited for tasks specifications with universally quantified locations, that has constant time with respect to the number of locations, enabling synthesis of plans for an arbitrary number of them. We propose a hybrid control framework that uses an iterator to manage the discretised workspace hiding it from a plan enacted by a discrete event controller. A downside of our approach is that it incurs in increased overhead when executing a synthesised plan. We demonstrate that the overhead is reasonable for missions of a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in simulated and real scenarios for up to 700000 locations.