On the Use of Safety Certification Practices in Autonomous Field Robot Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Robotics has recently seen an increasing development, and the areas addressed within robotics has extended into domains we consider safety-critical, fostering the development of standards that facilitate the development of safe robots. Safety standards describe concepts to maintain desired reactions or performance in malfunctioning systems, and influence industry regarding software development and project management. However, academia seemingly did not reach the same degree of utilisation of standards. This paper presents the findings from a systematic mapping study in which we study the state-of-the-art in developing software for safety-critical software for autonomous field robots. The purpose of the study is to identify practices used for the development of autonomous field robots and how these practices relate to available safety standards. Our findings from reviewing 49 papers show that standards, if at all, are barely used. The majority of the papers propose various solutions to achieve safety, and about half of the papers refer to non-standardised approaches that mainly address the methodical rather than the development level. The present study thus shows an emerging field still on the quest for suitable approaches to develop safety-critical software, awaiting appropriate standards for this support.

Thirteen years of SysML: a systematic mapping study

“…For instance, Nguyen et al [40] conducted a SMS by covering primary studies that focus on several SysML profiles like SysML-Sec. Other SMSs such as presented in [16,22] only touch SysML in their explanations and findings.…”

On the pragmatic design of literature studies in software engineering: an experience-based guideline

“…Second, results from such test runs can be used to harvest reference publications to support manual search strategies (as for instance exercised in [53]). Although this approach can be seen as everything but a good scientific practice, it still helps taking the initial steps into the overall research design development-especially in domains in which few or no secondary studies are present to provide structure to the field of interest (as it for instance was the case in [15]).…”

Mining the usage patterns of ROS primitives

“…In [3] the authors present and explore four static analysis techniques that could be relevant for analyzing robotic software, but concrete solutions on how to adapt them to ROS applications are not proposed. This team has previously proposed HAROS [1], a framework for the static analysis of ROS software 5 . Although it was successful in collecting basic quality metrics, advanced static analysis techniques were quickly encumbered by the complexity of ROS applications.…”

“…Alternatively, some authors have proposed the (manual) translation of ROS C ++ source code into languages more amenable to being statically analyzed, like SPARK [4]. A literature review on safety certification practices [5] has not detected the application of static analysis tools to standard robotic development frameworks, but only the verification of robots implemented in formal specification languages.…”