Acquisition and formalization of knowledge to ensure safe behavior of heterogenous unmanned autonomous systems - an interdisciplinary approach

Unmanned Systems (US) increase their potential when combined into teams, so-called Multi-Robot-Systems (MRS). This potential can be maximized through heterogeneity among the different team members and autonomy of each individual US. At the same time, however, autonomy also constitutes a risk, as it means that the human being no longer retains total control. It is therefore important that all autonomous US within a MRS behave safely during operation. There are different verification techniques that are in principle suitable to ensure this safety. Despite their differences, they all have in common that they rely on an exhaustive and adequately formalized knowledge base of safety requirements to carry out a verification process. Safety-relevant knowledge that has not fully been acquired and formalized is thus not available for verification and is very difficult to integrate retrospectively.This paper presents an approach to acquire and formalize this knowledge in a methodical and objective manner. Applicable to different modalities (air, land water), this interdisciplinary approach allows to identify relevant legal regulations as sources of knowledge, to extract knowledge regarding the safe behavior of MRS from these regulations, to formalize this knowledge and to align and link it in a multimodal way. This generates a unified and formalized connecting point for different verification techniques to ensure the safe operation of heterogeneous MRS.

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