Development of Assurance Techniques for High-Confidence Flight Software Design for Autonomous Unmanned Air Vehicles

Current flight software certificationprocedures for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)and Uninhabited Combat Airial Vehicles (UCAV),such as those employed under the Boeing/DARPAUCAV program, are tedious and cumbersome.Hence there is great interest in developing techniques thatreduce the time and effort needed to complete the certificationprocess even while guaranteeingthe closed-loop UCAV performance undera variety of situations and events.In this proposal we propose to develop efficient functional andsoftware V&V and assurance techniques forhigh-confidence software designfor UCAVs. Our ultimate objective is todevelop corresponding algorithms and software tool, anddemonstrate their features by reducing the software certificationtime and effort encountered in current procedures employedunder the Boeing/DARPA UCAV program.In order to achieve these objectives, in Phase I we propose tocarry out the following tasks:(i) Problem statement for the functional and software V&Vfor UCAV, and choice of a simulation testbed;(ii) Development of functional V&V techniques;(iii) Development of verifiable controllers for UCAVs;(iv) Development of software V&V techniques and assuranceand certification procedures; and (v) Performance evaluationof the proposed algorithms through simulations.Boeing Phantom Works DARPA/UCAV program (Dr. Kevin Wise) will providetechnical and commercialization support throughout the project.Potential applications of the proposed V&V andsoftware assurance techniques and proceduresinclude both military and civilian missions performed using autonomousagents. The applications include autonomous military and commercialUAV and spacecraftmissions, autonomous