Towards performance guarantees for emergent behavior

It is important to be able to guarantee the safety and effectiveness of robot behavior in applications where robots must operate alongside people or in hazardous situations. A modeling framework based on port automata and asynchronous communication is introduced in this paper. By looking at the internal transitions between port communications, an analysis approach is developed that removes the combinatoric issues of looking at an asynchronous combination of robot and environment. An example application of the approach to wheel slippage in a mobile robot is presented.