Formal Verification of Robot Teams or Human Robot Interaction

Project description

Robots are being developed to work in small groups (robot teams) or may be designed to work in collaboration with humans (human robot interaction). The former might be necessary as it may take several robots at achieve some task, some to hold an item whilst others work on it, several to transport something etc. For the latter, robot assistants need to interact closely with the people they are working with.

It is important to make sure both robot-robot teams and human-robot teams can achieve the task where possible, can recover from failure, interact in a safe manner etc. Verification is the process that checks the system does satisfy these required properties. This is often carried out using simulation or real robot experiments. Formal verification is a mathematical analysis of systems using techniques such as model checking or temporal theorem proving.

This project involves developing and applying formal verification to robot teams and human robot interactions. Additionally, using different formal and informal verification techniques together to improve confidence in systems could be further investigated. This will help ensure that they satisfy the required properties and to investigate the robustness of the system to failure. You will need experience and interests in formal methods/formal verification for this PhD.

This PhD is part of the CRADLE research project. CRADLE is an EPSRC funded Prosperity Partnership that brings together the industrial experience that Jacobs have in applied robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) with the research expertise at the University of Manchester in this field. The partnership aims to deliver novel and transformational RAS technology that enables robots to be deployed in the most demanding environments, such as space, nuclear, energy generation and urban infrastructure, over long lengths of time.