Adaptive Deployment of Safety Monitors for Autonomous Systems

Abstract

This article discusses the problem of deploying safety-critical software for an autonomous system, namely a collaborative robot operating in domestic environments. We present a deployment infrastructure to enhance both humans and robots in carrying out their deployment activities. We develop means to enable humans to explicitly specify the requirements of the software to be deployed, along with the resources of the robot platform on which the software will be executed. In addition, we propose an architecture which enables robots to autonomously re-deploy their software at run-time in order to account for changing requirements imposed by their task, platform and environment. We show how the architecture enables a collaborative robot to autonomously redeploy safety monitors for detecting in-hand slippage often occuring in human-robot handover tasks. By doing so, the robot autonomously maintains a certain safety level as the functioning of the monitor depends on both selecting and deploying the correct monitoring strategy for the situation at hand.