Verifying Plans and Scripts for Robotics Tasks Using Performance Level Profiles

Abstract

Performance-Level Profiles (PLPs) were introduced as a type of action representation language suitable for capturing the behavior of functional code for robotics. This paper addresses two issues that PLPs raise: (1) Their formal semantics. (2) How to verify a script or a plan that schedule the use of components that have been documented by PLPs. We provide a formal semantics for PLPs by mapping them to probabilistic timed automata (PTAs). We also show how, given a script that refers to components specified using PLPs, we derive a PTA specification of the entire system. This PTA can be used to verify the system’s properties and answers queries about its behavior. Finally, we empirically evaluate an implemented system based on these ideas, demonstrating its scalability. The result is a pragmatic approach for verifying component-based robotic systems.

A formal toolchain for offline and run-time verification of robotic systems

“…Even if these two acting frameworks do not directly map to a formal model, they point to the right direction to study them. We can find many more examples of verification for acting models in the literature: in [Kovalchuk et al, 2021] the authors consider probabilistic time automata (UPPAAL SMC) to model acting skills; ASPiC [Lesire and Pommereau, 2018] is an acting system based on the composition of skill Petri nets and behavior trees [Albore et al, 2021]; NuSMV has been used in [Simmons and Pecheur, 2000] to check Task Description Language (TDL) based acting components; RMPL [Williams and Ingham, 2003] and Proteus [McClelland et al, 2021] have been used for acting and monitoring; RAFCON [Brunner et al, 2016] provides mechanisms to model and execute plans produced by high-level planners. Finally, several works have studied the use of the logic-based action language Golog [Levesque et al, 1997, Claßen et al, 2012, Eckstein and Steinbauer, 2020, and the associated execution system Golex [Hähnel et al, 1998], as a newer acting framework.…”