A compositional approach to verifying modular robotic systems

Robotic systems used in safety-critical scenarios often rely on modular software architectures, and increasingly include autonomous components. Verifying that these modular robotic systems behave as expected requires approaches that can cope with, and preferably take advantage of, this inherent modularity. This paper describes a compositional approach to specifying the nodes in robotic systems built using the Robot Operating System (ROS), where each node is specified using First-Order Logic (FOL) Assume–Guarantee contracts that link the specification to the ROS implementation. We introduce inference rules that facilitate the composition of these node-level contracts to derive system-level properties. We also present a novel Domain-Specific Language, the ROS Contract Language (RCL), which captures a node's FOL specification and links this contract to its implementation. RCL contracts can be automatically translated, by our tool VANDA, into executable monitors; which we use to verify the contracts at runtime. We illustrate our approach through the specification and verification of an autonomous rover engaged in the remote inspection of a nuclear site, and finish with smaller examples that illustrate other useful features of our framework.