Software for cooperative autonomous systems

Developing software for cooperative autonomous systems is challenging, especially for safety-critical systems such as UAVs. A problem with current approaches in the design of UAV software is handling conflicting goals. Currently, there is no way to detect/avoid conflicting goals in the UAV software in a consistent and predictable manner. Component-based design and development can bring inherent reliability to an airborne system, however, these are rarely considered in current UAV component development. No work is available surrounding reliability by design of the integration of flight critical systems.

In this research we want to develop a methodology and a software architecture which is safety- and autonomy-oriented and can provide guarantees regarding the expected behaviour of applications created according to the methodology. The first goal is to define a component model that works within the constraints of real-time software. The second goal is to create a model for autonomous software entities, taking safety guarantees into account. The third goal of this task is to define a safety specification language, which is expressive enough to represent the high level safety requirements, but also formal enough to allow the verification of a safety specification written in such language.