Towards language-based verification of robot behaviors

The management of finite resources is central to many robot behaviors. Some robotic systems must maintain invariants regarding the disposition of feet for balancing, others have grippers for manipulating their environments, while yet others must respect strict rules governing the usage of objects in the environment. Yet the specifics of such resource management responsibilities are almost universally locked behind opaque controllers whose lack of type information greatly impedes rigorous static analysis. We present an application of dependent type theory and linear logic for the static analysis of robot behavior programs that manage both robot and environment state, with a worked assembly task example. This approach offers static, formal guarantees with respect to safety requirements attached to primitive actions, as well as introspection of expected state at each step of a scripted sequence of actions allowing for the automatic generation of dynamic, sensor-based, runtime verification of successful execution.