£6M awarded to interdisciplinary projects on verification and resilience of autonomous systems

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.

The TAS Node in Resilience is led by Radu Calinescu at the University of York. This project brings together the disciplines of Computer Science, Engineering, Law, Mathematics, Philosophy and Psychology from five UK Universities, to develop a comprehensive toolbox of principles, methods, and systematic approaches for the engineering of resilient autonomous systems and systems of systems. Ana Cavalcanti ‘s contribution to this project is related to the definition of usable and formal notations to capture resilience requirements.

The TAS Node in Verifiability is led by Mohammad Mousavi at the University of Leicester. This project brings together the disciplines of Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics also from five UK Universities, to develop a comprehensive unifying approach with novel rigorous techniques that automate the systematic and holistic verification of autonomous systems. RoboStar’s Ana Cavalcanti and Jim Woodcock lead this effort in York. In the University of Sheffield, the project is led by RoboStar’s Rob Hierons . Their contributions are related with the definition and formalisation of notations to support unified verification of a variety of properties using a variety of proof and testing techniques.

“Autonomous systems, in particular, mobile and autonomous robots have the potential to improve our quality of life and our connectivity as much as the Internet has achieved in the last two decades. For that, however, we need to be able to trust them.” said Ana Cavalcanti . “It is very exciting that we are in position to work with partners in a variety of academic disciplines and in a variety of industries to contribute to this exciting challenge. As As a result of these efforts, we expect to improve and extend the RoboStar notations and technology. We will consider aspects of human interaction, psychology, ethics, control engineering, and several others that make the software engineering of mobile autonomous robots a challenge.”