Paper ID: 2302.10292

AERoS: Assurance of Emergent Behaviour in Autonomous Robotic Swarms

Dhaminda B. Abeywickrama, James Wilson, Suet Lee, Greg Chance, Peter D. Winter, Arianna Manzini, Ibrahim Habli, Shane Windsor, Sabine Hauert, Kerstin Eder

The behaviours of a swarm are not explicitly engineered. Instead, they are an emergent consequence of the interactions of individual agents with each other and their environment. This emergent functionality poses a challenge to safety assurance. The main contribution of this paper is a process for the safety assurance of emergent behaviour in autonomous robotic swarms called AERoS, following the guidance on the Assurance of Machine Learning for use in Autonomous Systems (AMLAS). We explore our proposed process using a case study centred on a robot swarm operating a public cloakroom.

Submitted: Feb 20, 2023