ROSRV: runtime verification for the Robot Operating System

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used open-source framework for robot software development. Its increasing popularity, along with its renowned features, such as its dynamic and distributed nature, call for a safety and security protection mechanism which is not supplied as part of the framework. This thesis presents ROSRV, a runtime verification framework for ROS. ROSRV aims to address vulnerabilities in ROS in order to build more reliable robots by enforcing security policies and monitoring safety properties. It integrates with ROS seamlessly; in other words, it does not require any change to the ROS source code or the robot software. ROSRV has three major components: (1) a tool that provides an expressive formal specification language to define safety properties, and automatically generates monitors out of them, (2) a proxy node that manages these monitors which transparently intercept and observe messages exchanged by the computational units of ROS to ensure the system behaves as desired, and (3) an access control policy administered by the proxy node to restrict the impact of individual units on the overall system. ROSRV has been tested on a commercial robot running ROS and the evaluations showed promising results