Formal Methods in Robotics: a Tale from the Crypt

Abstract

In this talk I will describe my research contributions in the past fifteen years focused on improving safety and security in Robotics and, more in general, in Cyber-Physical Systems. 
The journey starts with the first paper proposing automated verification of neural networks in 2010 and goes through verification of adaptive policies, automata-learning for verification of control software, modeling and verification of swarm robotics, combining offline and runtime verification, and the more recent effort of dealing with control architecture models that combine behavior trees, state machines and neural networks to be deployed in actual robots combining ad-hoc components as well as off-the-shelf software and hardware.  
I will touch briefly on each contribution, focusing on results and open challenges, but I will be available for discussing more in detail each single topic given a specific interest from the audience.

About the Speaker

Armando Tacchella is full professor in Information Processing Systems at the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS), Polytechnic School – University of Genoa.
He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering in 2001.
Before joining the University of Genoa, he was research Associate at Rice University (Houston).
His research interests go from Design and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems to Computer Aided Verification and Reasoning, and Formal methods for Software Engineering.
He is the winner of the 2007 “Marco Somalvico” award for best Italian young researcher in AI, sponsored by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.
He has published many papers and abstracts in international journals and conferences.