FMRA 2014 - 5th Workshop on Formal Methods for Robotics and Automation

How can we guarantee robots will never cause harm? How can we prove that complicated mechanical systems, controlled by computers and programmed by people will always behave as expected, under changing conditions and in a variety of uncertain environments? How do we formalize what such behaviors are?

Guaranteeing safety, predictability and reliability of robots is crucial for the assimilation of such systems into society, be it at home or in the workplace. While every robotics researcher working with or on a robot is aware of safety issues, only recently the robotics community has begun looking at ways to either formally prove or guarantee by design different behavioral properties such as safety and correctness. The results that will be presented in the workshop combine and extend ideas from automata theory, logic, model checking, hybrid systems and control and they pave the way toward creating robotic “formal methods” ? a body of work that will ultimately result in provable correct robotic systems.

This full day workshop brings together leading researchers from the robotics, formal methods and hybrid systems communities, as well as researchers from industry. We will discuss the state of the art, existing tools, and challenges that must be addressed in order to create safe and reliable systems that can be proven to be correct, either by design or by verification. This workshop follows the successful workshops held at ICRA 2009, 2010, CAV 2011 and RSS 2013.

Organizers:

Calin Belta - Boston University

Hadas Kress-Gazit - Cornell University