AERoS: Assurance of Emergent Behaviour in Autonomous Robotic Swarms

Swarm robotics provides an approach to the coordination of large numbers of robots inspired by swarm behaviours in nature [1]. The overall behaviours of a swarm are not explicitly engineered in the system. Instead, they are an emergent consequence of the interactions of individual agents with each other and the environment [2]; this poses a challenge to assurance. According to the ISO standard for systems and software engineering vocabulary [3], assurance is defined as "all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system, and demonstrated as needed, to provide adequate confidence that an entity will fulfil requirements for quality". Assurance tasks comprise conformance to standards, verification and validation (V&V), and certification. Assurance criteria for autonomous systems (AS) include both functional and non-functional requirements such as safety [4]. Existing standards and regulations of AS are either implicitly or explicitly based on the V lifecycle model [5], which moves from requirements through design onto implementation and testing before deployment [6, 7]. However, this model is unlikely to be suitable for systems with emergent behaviour (EB); for example through interaction with other agents and the environment, as is the case with swarms. ISO standards have been developed for the service robotics sector (non-industrial) (e.g.