Abstract: This talk will discuss current work ongoing at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the area of autonomy and suggest possible inroads for formal verification techniques. Autonomy efforts in the Laboratory span a number of domains including: autonomous air vehicles, spacecraft and naval ship systems. To date, most of these efforts have just scratched the surface of what is possible with verification technologies and we hope to encourage a dialog on how formal techniques might be applied in the future. Of particular emphasis will be a recent effort to develop a more agile and robust fault autonomy system using graphical design specifications and modern model-checking tools.

Michael J. Pekala is a Senior Staff member of the Research and Technology Development Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University in 1998 and 2001 respectively. Mr. Pekala joined the Laboratory in 1998, and his current focus is on the research and development of autonomous systems. His email address is mike.pekala@jhuapl.edu. Appointments: dcm@cs.cmu.edu