An Overview of Verification and Validation Challenges for Inspection Robots

Abstract

The advent of sophisticated robotics and AI technology makes sending humans into hazardous and distant environments to carry out inspections increasingly avoidable. Being able to send a robot, rather than a human, into a nuclear facility or deep space is very appealing. However, building these robotic systems is just the start and we still need to carry out a range of verification and validation tasks to ensure that the systems to be deployed are as safe and reliable as possible. Based on our experience across three research and innovation hubs within the UK’s “Robots for a Safer World” programme, we present an overview of the relevant techniques and challenges in this area. As the hubs are active across nuclear, offshore, and space environments, this gives a breadth of issues common to many inspection robots.

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

“…Fisher et al highlighted the requirement and benefits of robots in extreme environments in their review paper. [ 18 ] Irawan et al [ 19 ] reviewed the methods of contruction for reconfigurable modular swarm robotics can be used in situ for autonomous 3D printing in extreme environments.…”

Resilience, reliability, and coordination in autonomous multi-agent systems

“…Many autonomous systems and robotic applications, particularly in safety-critical domains [26], require some form of formal verification to assure stakeholders that unsafe behaviours are not possible (or at least very unlikely) to occur, and/or that system objectives will be achieved. This is evidenced by, for example, the overview of verification challenges for inspection robots reported in [18] which also describes the common issues encountered in verifying remote inspection tasks during the authors' experience in three research hubs within the UK's "Robots for a Safer World" programme and which included involvement by members of A 3 . Verification research in the A 3 group has focused in particular on the verification of resource-bounded agents and multi-agent systems, where the behaviour of the agents depends on the resources they have available (e.g., time, money, battery power).…”

“…There are many ways of improving the reliability of a system and to try to tackle these challenges. For autonomous systems, the techniques often include verification and validation, ranging from formal verification to simulation-based and physical-based testing [18]. Reliability is somewhat similar to resilience since both deal with increasing the trustworthiness of a system, and the two concepts are therefore closely interconnected.…”

Towards the Determination of Safe Operating Envelopes for Autonomous UAS in Offshore Inspection Missions

“…The intention is to replace these with, for example, rational agents. The rational agents can be formally verified using techniques such as those described in [23,24]. The techniques presented in this paper thus find a place between the formal verification of autonomous system decisions, for example, that the correct/safe decisions are made given what the vehicle perceives about its world, and physical testing of real systems in a practical environment.…”