Why is verification and validation so crucial for the success of advanced robotics?

Anthony Pipe

University of West England

Abstract

It is clear that many of the application domains for advanced robotics currently targeted by the robotics research community will be those where the barrier between them and the, often highly unstructured, rest of the world will be torn down. Development of a certification process for such devices will be imperative. It follows that such a critical part of this certification process will be a safety-case based argument and that, in turn, this will have to be backed up by verification and validation of the correct behaviour of such robots acting in these settings. In this session, we will discuss these issues in some depth, considering not only the technology challenges, but also in the context of critical issues for acceptability, as well as new financial, legal, regulatory and insurance structures that may be required. The discussion will be set in the context of an upcoming revolution in, what this presenter would consider to be robotics; the emergence of autonomous vehicles on our roads.