Towards temporal verification of swarm robotic systems

  • Authors:

  • Clare Dixon;Alan F. T. Winfield;Michael Fisher;Chengxiu Zeng

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK;Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

  • Venue:
  • Robotics and Autonomous Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

A robot swarm is a collection of simple robots designed to work together to carry out some task. Such swarms rely on the simplicity of the individual robots; the fault tolerance inherent in having a large population of identical robots; and the self-organised behaviour of the swarm as a whole. Although robot swarms present an attractive solution to demanding real-world applications, designing individual control algorithms that can guarantee the required global behaviour is a difficult problem. In this paper we assess and apply the use of formal verification techniques for analysing the emergent behaviours of robotic swarms. These techniques, based on the automated analysis of systems using temporal logics, allow us to analyse whether all possible behaviours within the robot swarm conform to some required specification. In particular, we apply model-checking, an automated and exhaustive algorithmic technique, to check whether temporal properties are satisfied on all the possible behaviours of the system. We target a particular swarm control algorithm that has been tested in real robotic swarms, and show how automated temporal analysis can help to refine and analyse such an algorithm.