Probabilistic Verification of Multi-Robot Missions in Uncertain Environments

Abstract

The effective use of autonomous robot teams in highly-critical missions depends on being able to establish performance guarantees. However, establishing a guarantee for the behavior of an autonomous robot operating in an uncertain environment with obstacles is a challenging problem. This paper addresses the challenges involved in building a software tool for verifying the behavior of a multi-robot waypoint mission that includes uncertain environment geometry as well as uncertainty in robot motion. One contribution of this paper is an approach to the problem of a priori specification of uncertain environments for robot program verification. A second contribution is a novel method to extend the Bayesian Network formulation to reason about random variables with different subpopulations, introduced to address the challenge of representing the effects of multiple sensory histories when verifying a robot mission. The third contribution is experimental validation results presented to show the effectiveness of this approach on a two-robot, bounding over watch mission.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2015
Accession Number
AD1002664

Entities

People

  • Dagan Harrington
  • Damian M. Lyons
  • Feng Tang
  • Peng Tang
  • Ronald C. Arkin
  • Shu Jiang

Organizations

  • Georgia Tech

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Autonomous Navigation
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Formal Languages
  • Geometry
  • Guidance
  • Language
  • Motion Planning
  • Probabilistic Models
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Robot Navigation
  • Robots
  • Two Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Naval Personnel Management
  • Robotics and Automation.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control