Dynamic Run-Time Assurance Using Online Reachability

EM&A proposes a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research project to develop and plan commercialization of a new approach and software for runtime assurance (RTA) which uses fast, real-time reachability computations to provide dynamic boundaries of operation for the advanced controller and a decision module based on stored command sequences and dynamic run-time checks to enable use of unverified safety controllers. Intelligent, fully autonomous air, ground, surface, underwater, and space vehicles and stationary systems can enable task performance, accuracy, repeatability, and safety levels and response speeds that are either impossible or too costly to accomplish with their manned counterparts. A critical challenge for intelligent autonomy systems is the requirement to guarantee their correct performance in all scenarios, but design-time verification for real-life autonomous systems is often intractable. In standard RTA, an advanced, not fully verified controller is designed to operate at most times and a safety controller to replace it when needed to ensure safety. Our proposed approach allows the use of a safety controller that can also be not fully verified. It will also enable expansion of the portion of the state space where the advanced, higher performing controller can operate, with respect to that achievable without our developments. In Phase I, our team, which has substantial experience and published work in RTA, system verification, and reachability analysis, will develop a prototype of the online reachability module (ORM) and the black-box Simplex system with Online (real-time) Reachability (SOR). During the Phase I development, our team will test the ORM and SOR software implementations on simple models first, to verify and optimize their performance. Next, we will test on problems of U.S. Air Force interest and start exploring ways for making the software available outside the MATLAB environment used for development. In Phase II, we expect to increase the reliability of the software for use in real-world, physical applications, possibly including flight testing on small UAS platforms and/or on sophisticated simulators. This will also involve making the software available to run on embedded processors. Moreover, Phase II will include refinement and execution of our commercialization strategy, including planning and hopefully carrying out demonstrations for military and commercial applications. We expect Phase III to consist of implementation of our novel RTA technology on key Air Force programs and commercial systems based on intelligent autonomy.