On the 23rd of March 2023, Pedro Ribeiro will be delivering a talk on “Co-verification: from simulation to verification” as part of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub Verfiability Node talk series.
Lex Bailey will be presenting a paper on “Checking Confidentiality in Isabelle/UTP” at the Formal Methods 2023 Doctoral Symposium in Lübeck, Germany.
Professors Ana Cavalcanti and Jim Woodcock will be giving talks, on “Software Engineering for Robotics” and “Towards a Unifying Framework for Uncertainty in CPS”, respectively, at a colloquium to honor Prof. Jan Peleska’s contributions and achievements in applicable formal methods for safe industrial products. The event will take place on the 3rd of March 2023 at the University of Bremen.
The Chairs in Emerging Technologies annual event of the Royal Academy of Engineering is taking place 17:30-19:15 on the 27th of April 2023 at the University of York. There will be fascinating talks by a panel of experts, including Professor Ana Cavalcanti . The panel will consider the problems that AI can solve and explain the anticipated applications of this emerging technology. They will also question the problems that come with developing robots – for instance, can we trust them? The event is free of charge to attend in-person or online. Registration is available via the Royal of Academy event page.
Professors Ana Cavalcanti and Jim Woodcock were cited in the Trustworthy and Autonomous Systems Thought Pieces on Resilience and Verification, respectively.
On the 17th of January 2023 Ana Cavalcanti will be giving a seminar on Software Engineering for Robotics as part of the BAME STEM group at the University of Bristol.
On the 16th of December 2022 Ana Cavalcanti was the guest in 30th episode of the RobotTalk Podcast run by the UK-RAS Network. It is available for listening online as well as on other podcast platforms.
On the 8th of December 2022, Alvaro Miyazawa delivered a tutorial on “RoboStar and RoboTool: Software Engineering for Robotics using Formal Methods” at the 25th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods.
Gustavo Carvalho will talk about recent developments in RoboWorld at a seminar of the Grammatical Framework group. It is taking place on Friday the 11th of November, 13:00-14:30 UTC and can be joined on-line.
Matt Windsor will deliver a talk on “RoboCert: Property Specification for Robot Software” to HackSoc, the York Computer Science student society.
The paper “Probabilistic modelling and verification using RoboChart and PRISM”, published in the Journal of Software & Systems Modelling (SoSyM), was awarded a best paper award. Kangfeng Ye presented the paper at MODELS’22.
Colleagues Kangfeng Ye and Matt Windsor will be presenting their papers at ICFEM’2022 on the 26-27 October 2022 on “Formally Verified Animation for RoboChart using Interaction Trees”, and “RoboCert: Property Specification in Robotics”, respectively.
As part of the Verfiability Node series of talks, Thomas Wright delivered a talk on Verified Self-Adaptation of an Incubator Digital Twin and Matt Windsor talked about “RoboCert: Property Specification in Robotics”. These and other recorded talks can be found on the Verfiability Node’s YouTube channel.
On 11-12 October YorRobots and RoboStar will be hosting an Industry Exhibition, which will be held in person on the Heslington East campus. There will be talks and demonstrations by RoboStar colleagues and from YorRobots, The Institute for Safe Autonomy, Adelard, AgroIntelli, BAE, Bristol Robotics Lab, ClearSy, Chemspeed Technologies, Connected Places, LabMan, LDRA, DRis-Q, Dyson, RobotCenter, ShadowRobot, Thales and VSI. The programme can be found here and registration is here.
Ana Cavalcanti and Jim Woodcock led courses on Software Engineering for Robotics and Isabelle/HOL as part of the 18th International Summer School on Trustworthy Software organised by the School of Software Engineering of East China Normal University. RoboStar colleagues James Baxter , Gustavo Carvalho , Alvaro Miyazawa , Pedro Ribeiro and Matt Windsor delivered practicals and seminars.
Ana Cavalcanti featured as a speaker in the latest Living with AI Podcast of the TAS Hub.
Thinking about PhD study? We have an exciting opportunity for a fully funded studentship in Robotics commencing in October 2022. Find out more: https://bit.ly/3cAWFqf
Ana Cavalcanti will be delivering an invited talk at the Second Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy.
1st-year PhD student Holly Hendry won the prize Most Promising Research Direction at a conference organised by Thales for their iCASE PhD students. Thales representatives were most impressed by the research objectives and how Holly had considered the impact of the research to Thales and industry. Royal Academy of Engineering Industry Fellow Dr Mark Chattington , from Thales, commented that “Holly’s performance was exceptional”.
On the 9th of May, Ana Cavalcanti will be leading a seminar on “How can we define operational requirements in robotics?” together with colleagues James Baxter and Gustavo Carvalho . Registration is open now. The event is organised by BCS London Central Branch and BCS North London branch.
On the 18th of March, Ana Cavalcanti will be delivering an invited talk at the International Women’s Day Celebration in Computer Science.
Ana Cavalcanti will be delivering an invited talk at the York & North Yorkshire LEP Skills Conference on “Software Engineering for Robotics in Industry 4.0”. The talk can be watched on YouTube.
A special issue of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (Elsevier) on Sofware Engineering for Robotics is now accepting submissions. The call for papers can be found here.
Ana Cavalcanti will be delivering an invited lecture at the International School on Formal Methods and Theoretical Informatics on “Formal methods in robotics”.
Ana Cavalcanti will be delivering an invited talk at the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods on “RoboWorld: where can my robot work?”.
On the 1st of October 2021 Ana Cavalcanti gave an invited talk at the IROS2021 Workshop on Quality and Reliability Assessment of Robotic Software Architectures and Components on “Diagrammatic physical robot models in RoboSim”.
We are proud to welcome Dr Mark Chattington, from Thales, who joins us part-time until December, 2022, with funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering Industry Fellowship. His work is on the use of RoboStar technology to design and verify Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) with humans in the loop. This is also a collaboration with Dr Cade McCall from the York Psychology Department.
Ana Cavalcanti , James Baxter , Alvaro Miyazawa , and Pedro Ribeiro delivered an invited tutorial on RoboChart at the 18th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing. Resources for RoboChart tutorial can be found here.
Ana Cavalcanti and Jim Woodcock will be delivering courses on RoboChart as part of the Summer School organised by Zhimming Liu at the School of Software, Northwest Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China. Ana’s course will focus on the core aspects of RoboChart and its formal process-algebraic semantics, while Jim’s course will focus on probabilistic RoboCharts. Colleagues James Baxter , Alvaro Miyazawa , and Pedro Ribeiro will demonstrate the use of RoboTool for modelling and verification of a case study.
Matt Windsor will be presenting a poster on RoboStar technologies at the All Hands Meeting of the UKRI Trustworthy and Autonomous Systems Hub.
RoboSoft book edited by Cavalcanti, A., Dongol, B., Hierons, R., Timmis, J., Woodcock, J. is now available from Springer. It presents techniques for robotics, related to model-based software engineering, product lines, mission specification, component-based development, simulation, testing, and verification.
On the 9th of June 2021 Ana Cavalcanti gave an invited talk at ABZ on “RoboStar technology - a roboticist’s toolbox for combined proof and sound simulation”.
There are two funded PhD positions available in our group for work on: (EPSRC iCASE) “Human-Robot Interaction: modelling and verification”, and “Building Trustworthy Physics Engines for Robotic Simulations”. Further details, including eligibility criteria and application instructions can be found by following the links above.
On the 18th of May 2021 Ana Cavalcanti will be giving an invited talk at the workshop on Verification of Autonomous & Robotic Systems (VARS) as part of the CPS-IoT Week 2021.
On the 28th of January 2021 Ana Cavalcanti will be giving a seminar on Software Engineering for Robotics as part of the UKRI TAS Verifiability Node talks. You can participate via Teams.
On the 13th of January 2021 Ana Cavalcanti will be giving a seminar on Software Engineering for Robotics as part of the women+@DCS group at The Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. women+@DCS is a group that supports activities for promoting greater inclusion and visibility in computer science teaching, research and academic leadership.
On the 11th of November 2020 Rob Hierons gave a talk as part of the UKRI TAS Verifiability Node talks. You can rewatch this and other talks through the Verifiability events page.
The RoboStar team is involved in two projects that will improve the state of the art on the resilience and verification of autonomous systems to improve the trustworthiness of their decisions and actions. Each project has been awarded £3M from the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme.
On the 29th of October 2020 Jim Woodcock gave a talk as part of the UKRI TAS Verifiability Node series. You can rewatch it on YouTube.
RoboTool is being used by colleagues at the University of Agder to model an HVC (High Voltage Controller) from an industrial painting robot, and to analyse safety-critical properties of the controller.
RoboStar was awarded funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering to collaborate with Simomics for a period of three years. The goal of the collaboration is to explore opportunities to combine the RoboStar technology and the Simomics tools to support auditing and evolution of RoboChart and RoboSim models. The RoboStar team is excited about this opportunity that has the potential to reveal commercialisation paths for their research.
As part of the 2020 edition of YorkTalks, Ana Cavalcanti delivered a inspirational short talk on software engineering for robotics. “From computer says no to robot says yes: engineering a positive future for robotics” can be watched on-line.
The two-day event on Software Engineering for Robotics was well received by attendees at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. It featured 15 talks by academics and industry representatives, as well as robotics demonstrations, and a panel discussion on ethics and regulation.
The paper “RoboChart: modelling and verification of the functional behaviour of robotic applications”, published in the Journal of Software & Systems Modelling (SoSyM), was awarded a best paper award. Alvaro Miyazawa presented the paper at MODELS’19 in Munich.
The RoboStar team is collaborating with the Royal Academy of Engineering to organise a two-day event in November on Software Engineering for Robotics. Details can be found on the RoboSoft page and on the RAEng event page.
Alvaro Miyazawa and Pedro Ribeiro delivered a tutorial on RoboTool at the [CyPhyAssure Spring School](Alvaro Miyazawa , and Pedro Ribeiro ). Resources for the tutorial, as presented at the time, can be found here.
In March 2019 the University of York hosted the first CyPhyAssure Spring School on computer-assisted assurance, organised by Simon Foster and Mario Gleirscher. Invited lectures covered topics such as autonomy, robotics, verification, testing, formal methods, and the future of assurance.
The first event of YorRobots, which will take place on the 11th of January 2019, aims to bring together the researchers in York who would like to get involved in this community, so that they can meet each other and plan, together, the future of YorRobots and York’s presence in the UK-RAS Network.
Ana Cavalcanti delivered a keynote on RoboCalc during iFM 2018.
On 14 August ESC’s Ron Bell OBE (Director) and Dr Fan Ye (Principal Consultant) made a contribution to a research project titled “RoboTest” being undertaken at the Computer Science Department at the University of York in collaboration with the Department of Electronic Engineering, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Surrey.
On 13th of April the RoboCalc team will be attending the Advisory Board meeting of the closely related research project RoboTest at Brunel University London.
Ana Cavalcanti is taking up a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair on Emerging Technologies to pursue the long-term vision of RoboCalc.
Jim Woodcock has been awarded a Royal Society grant to collaborate with Zhimming Liu from Southwest University, China, on “Requirements Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems”.
On the 16th of May the RoboCalc team will be participating in the Pint of Science festival at York with the talk “RoboScience: can using robots add up to a safer world?”. Doors open at 7pm. Tickets are available now.
On the 1st of December Ana Cavalcanti delivered a keynote on RoboCalc as part of the 20th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods (SBMF) in Recife, Brazil. The abstract is available on-line.
Over the course of 2 weeks, Ana Cavalcanti delivered a module on RoboChart at UFPE, including practical sessions on the use of RoboTool/FDR for modelling and analysis. Students are now using RoboTool to support modelling and analysis of robotic systems as part of their degree projects.
RoboCalc was presented to a group of experts from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil and the Center for Advanced Studies and Systems Cesar. UFPE has the largest research group on software reliability in Brazil. Cesar is a business incubator and innovation centre, the largest component of Porto Digital in Recife (where UFPE is located). We are discussing close collaboration with UFPE and Cesar on topics related to RoboCalc.
RoboCalc was showcased at a recent EPSRC review of Robotics and AI funded research. All currently EPSRC funded projects presented their work to an international panel, addressing issues such as potential impact of the work, collaboration with industry and fundametal academic questions that underpin the research.
On the 7th of November 2016 Wei Li presented the poster From Formalised State Machines to Implementations of Robotic Controllers at the 13th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2016), which was held at the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
On the 29th of September Ana Cavalcanti [presented RoboCalc] to the Formal Aspects of Computing Science Specialist Group (FACS), the British Computer Society (BCS) Specialist Group for practitioners in Formal Aspects of Computing Science.
Our paper From Formalised State Machines to Automatic Implementations of Robotic Controllers has been accepted for the 13th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2016), which will take place from 6 to 9 November 2016 at the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
On the 21st of March 2016 Alvaro Miyazawa presented the RoboCalc poster at the Intelligent Robotic and Autonomous Systems Conference (IRAS 2016) which was held at Lancaster University, UK.
On the 1-4 December 2015 the School on Verification of Mobile and Autonomous Robots and Workshop was held at the Department of Computer Science.
On Monday the 30th of November 2015, the kick-off meeting with our Advisory Board was held at the Department of Computer Science.
Department of Computer Science
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Tel: 01904 325500
