Menghi, Claudio, Tsigkanos, Christos, Askarpour, Mehrnoosh et al. (4 more authors) (2024) Mission Specification Patterns for Mobile Robots: Providing Support for Quantitative Properties. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. pp. 2741-2760. ISSN 0098-5589
Abstract
With many applications across domains as diverse as logistics, healthcare, and agriculture, service robots are in increasingly high demand. Nevertheless, the designers of these robots often struggle with specifying their tasks in a way that is both human-understandable and sufficiently precise to enable automated verification and planning of robotic missions. Recent research has addressed this problem for the functional aspects of robotic missions through the use of mission specification patterns. These patterns support the definition of robotic missions involving, for instance, the patrolling of a perimeter, the avoidance of unsafe locations within an area, or reacting to specific events. Our paper introduces a catalog of QUantitAtive RoboTic mission spEcificaTion patterns (QUARTET) that tackles the complementary and equally important challenge of specifying the reliability, performance, resource use, and other key quantitative properties of robotic missions. Identified using a methodology that included the analysis of 73 research papers published in 17 leading software engineering and robotics venues between 2014–2021, our 22 QUARTET patterns are defined in a tool-supported domain-specific language. As such, QUARTET enables: (i) the precise definition of quantitative robotic-mission requirements; and (ii) the translation of these requirements into probabilistic reward computation tree logic (PRCTL), and thus their formal verification and the automated planning of robotic missions. We demonstrate the applicability of QUARTET by showing that it supports the specification of over 95% of the quantitative robotic mission requirements from a systematically selected set of recent research papers, of which 75% can be automatically translated into PRCTL for the purposes of verification through model checking and mission planning.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Computer Science (York) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC EP/V026747/1 |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 06 Dec 2022 12:50 |
Last Modified: | 30 Nov 2024 01:17 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3230059 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1109/TSE.2022.3230059 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:194149 |