Humans in the design of mobile and autonomous robots

Robotics is a very exciting area of application; not only it is fun, but it also has potential for huge economic and social impact.  A lot has been achieved, and a lot is expect to happen in the next decade or so.  Software engineering techniques that provide appropriate and specific support for robot engineers, however, are few and far between. 

This project will will examine how human behaviour can be considered from the very beginning of the design of a robotic system all the way through to its operation. It will adopt and extend a domain-specific notation for mobile and autonomous robots called RoboChart. It is being developed under a ten-year project involving a large team of researchers in York, and collaborators worldwide (https://robostart.cs.york.ac.uk). Using RoboChart, we can provide a comprehensive account of a robotic system, including the control software, the robotic platform, and the environment. We cannot, however, support modelling of human behaviour. The way human operators or users interact with an autonomous system can, nevertheless, have a significant impact on its behaviour and, therefore, safety. For example, an autonomous vehicle may need to pass control back to a human driver. Several questions arise when considering human factors: what information do human operators need, how much information can they process and at what rate, and how do these factors change over time and with experience?

In this project, we will collaborate with Dr Cade McCall, from the Department of Psychology, and with Thales,  to investigate how to integrate a model of human behaviour and human procedures with RoboChart. We will identify the modelling notation to be used, and develop support for verification of designs using tools.

Prerequisites: This project is ideal for a student interested in modelling and specification.  Programming experience is essential, and a good mathematical background is important.

Resources:

1. We have a tool to support use of RoboChart: https://robostar.cs.york.ac.uk/tools/.
2. A. Miyazawa, P. Ribeiro, W. Li, A. L. C. Cavalcanti, and J. Timmis. Automatic property checking of robotic applications. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 3869--3876, 2017. [ bib | DOI | .pdf ]

3. A. Miyazawa, P. Ribeiro, W. Li, A. L. C. Cavalcanti, J. Timmis, and J. C. P. Woodcock. RoboChart: modelling and verification of the functional behaviour of robotic applications. Software & Systems Modeling, 18(5):3097--3149, 2019. [ bib | DOI | http ]

Funding:  eligibility criteria and application instructions can be found here.