Dependability Issues in a Robot Control Architecture

International audienceThis paper presents the LAAS architecture for autonomous mobile robots and some recent developments to improve the dependability of the system. In particular, this paper focuses on the role of the Execution Control level of this architecture. This level has a fault protection (safety bag) role with respect to the commands issued to the functional level which is connected to the physical devices. These commands come either from the decisional level, or from the functional level itself. We introduce a new approach and a new tool inspired from the model checking domain. We present a new language to specify the model of acceptable and required states of the system (valid contexts for requests to functional module and resources usage). This language is compiled in an OBDD (Ordered Binary Decision Diagram) like structure which is then used online to check the specified constraints in realtime. Such a model checking approach could be extended to check off line more complex temporal properties of the system