SBIR Phase I: UAS Certification Artifact Formulation Environment

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research project will build on previous work in compositional Verification and Validation (V&V) for autonomous vehicles to demonstrate a new capability for establishing safety and reliability arguments satisfying both regulatory and certification requirements. This compositional V&V tool supports complex modular architectures and reconfiguration, and encompasses both discrete and continuous dynamics, permitting the explicit modeling of both control modes (including fault and safing modes), and vehicle dynamics. An explicit model of uncertain outcomes and uncontrollable events will be created and integrated into previous work using semi-Markov decision processes which are a good fit for the requirements of this application. The value proposition of this project is to enable many more Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UAS) to be granted permission to operate in regulated environments. Commercial feasibility will established through a collaboration with the Safety Security Rescue Research Center, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC), and its industry partners. The initial target markets for this work will be ground and aerial UAS, to both the providers/manufacturers as a means to reduce costs and development time and users as a means to utilize the UAS to their full mission potential. This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).