New funding from ORCA Partnership Resource Fund for verification and assurance of RAS project

News | Posted on Friday 15 November 2019

We are delighted to announce that Dr Radu Calinescu has been awarded funding from ORCA for a new verification and assurance project

Dr Radu Calinescu is the lead investigator on a new project which has been awarded funding from the ORCA Partnership Resource Fund. Dr Simos Gerasimou is a co-investigator and the research partner is Heriot-Watt University.

Overview of the project

Verifying robotic systems (RS) to obtain assurances that they operate safely and reliably is often very challenging due to the uncertainties associated with measuring their parameters and those of their environments, and with using such measures to detect disruptive changes and to adapt to or recover from them.

In this project the team will develop a theoretical foundation comprising novel run-time methods for RS change-point detection, diagnosis of system-level RS failures, and synthesis of new RS configurations enabling recovery from these failures.

They will integrate these methods into an end-to-end methodology for the engineering and assurance of RS operating in uncertain, rapidly changing environments, and validate their feasibility by developing two demonstrators. The first demonstrator will use research mobile robots to implement a proof-of-concept infrastructure maintenance application. For the second demonstrator, the team will develop a fully-fledged simulator of an unmanned underwater vehicle used for offshore pipe inspection.

To maximise the project impact, we will collaborate closely with the York-led Assuring Autonomy International Programme, and with research teams at NASA’s Ames Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University; and will contribute relevant project outputs to the IEEE Guidelines for the Verification of Autonomous Systems.

Find out more