Robust autonomy for interactive robots

The growing trend in robotics towards applications in an unstructured environment offers new challenges in robotic software and control. Assisting, interacting and serving humans, new robots will literally touch people and their lives. Performing tasks devised for such new robots demands high levels of autonomy, robustness and safety, and the challenge to ensure these qualities has become a task of robot control soft- ware. The reliability of robot control software is the cornerstone needed to achieve high levels of autonomy, robustness and safety. The goal of this research is to study and suggest ways to improve the reliability of a robot, with a focus on its motion control software. Robot motion control ensures the ability to proceed with a designated task, and it is one of the vital parts of a robot, where non-functional requirements such as robustness and reliability are essential for high quality of the overall system. In this work, three threats to reliability and safety of the motion control software were identified and addressed: the quality of software implementation, the external faults from a connection to the physical domain such as failures of a sensor, and the external faults from a connection within the cyber domain such as communication to other components. A modeling approach to software development is advocated here as the means to improve quality of the produced software. The proposed approach for software development uses ‘uniform’ modeling of the software components to improve their reliability. The need to model software from different perspectives is emphasized here, with the software practice of separation of concerns used to identify different perspectives from which a software component has to be modeled.