Descripción del proyecto
Progresos en el desarrollo de sistemas autónomos
En los últimos años, los ingenieros y los científicos informáticos han desarrollado sistemas autónomos para su uso en una gran variedad de entornos, como los vehículos autónomos, los robots agrícolas o los vehículos aéreos no tripulados. Sin embargo, estos sistemas afrontan un serio problema durante su desarrollo. El principal obstáculo para los investigadores consiste en averiguar cómo programarlos para que se adapten a situaciones especiales. Por desgracia, es prácticamente imposible definir con claridad y antelación cómo deberían gestionar estos sistemas todos los problemas que se van a encontrar. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos justITSELF establecerá un cambio de paradigma que se aleja de las respuestas prediseñadas por programación. En su lugar, este nuevo método se centrará en la verificación «justo a tiempo», un proceso en el que el sistema evalúa la siguiente acción constantemente a fin de actuar con seguridad.
Objetivo
Engineers and computer scientists are currently developing autonomous systems whose entire set of behaviors in future, untested situations is unknown: How can a designer foresee all situations that an autonomous road vehicle, a robot in a human environment, an agricultural robot, or an unmanned aerial vehicle will face? Keeping in mind that all these examples are safety-critical, it is irresponsible to deploy such systems without testing all possible situations---this, however, seems impossible since even the most important possible situations are unmanageably many. I propose a paradigm shift that will make it possible to guarantee safety in unforeseeable situations: Instead of verifying the correctness of a system before deployment, I propose just-in-time verification, a new, to-be-developed verification paradigm where a system continuously checks the correctness of its next action by itself in its current environment (and only in it) in a just-in-time manner. Since future autonomous systems will have a tight interconnection of discrete computing and continuous physical elements, also known as cyber-physical systems, I will develop just-in-time verification for this system class. In order to prove correct behavior of cyber-physical systems, I will develop new formal verification techniques that efficiently compute possible future behaviors---subject to uncertain initial states, inputs, and parameters---within a small time horizon. Just-in-time verification will substantially cut development costs, increase the autonomy of systems (e.g. the range of deployment of automated driving systems), and reduce or even eliminate certain liability claims. The results will be implemented in an open-source software framework and will be primarily demonstrated for automated driving. Successful development of just-in-time verification techniques is yet more challenging than offline verification of autonomous systems, but expected to bring even greater rewards.
Ámbito científico
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Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
80333 Muenchen
Alemania