Teaching

Instructor: ESE 680-003: Formal Methods for Autonomous Robots (Fall 2019)

The term "formal methods" refers to mathematical techniques and tools for verification that automatic translation of specifications into behavior/design. Formal methods are essential for building systems used for safety-critical and mission-critical applications. As robots are increasingly being used for such applications, use of formal methods has become critical for building robotic systems. In this course, we will study the recent development of formal methods based techniques for building software for robots. In the first part of the course, basic concepts in formal methods will be covered. In the second part, recent state-of-the-art formal-methods-based and learning-based techniques will be presented that allow for safe and robust autonomy of multi-agent systems in the presence of uncertainty.

Textbooks:

• Baier, Christel, and Joost-Pieter Katoen. Principles of model checking. MIT press, 2008.
• Belta, Calin, Boyan Yordanov, and Ebru Aydin Gol. Formal methods for discrete-time dynamical systems. Springer, 2017.