Engineering the Hardware/Software Interface for Robotic Platforms – A Comparison of Applied Model Checking with Prolog and Alloy
Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2013
Robotic platforms serve different use cases ranging from experiments
for prototyping assistive applications up to embedded systems for realizing
cyber-physical systems in various domains. We are using 1:10 scale
miniature vehicles as a robotic platform to conduct research in the domain
of self-driving cars and collaborative vehicle fleets. Thus, experiments
with different sensors like e.g. ultra-sonic, infrared, and rotary encoders need
to be prepared and realized using our vehicle platform. For each setup, we need
to configure the hardware/software interface board to handle all sensors and
actors. Therefore, we need to find a specific configuration setting for each
pin of the interface board that can handle our current hardware setup
but which is also flexible enough to support further sensors or actors for
future use cases. In this paper, we show how to model the domain of the
configuration space for a hardware/software interface board to enable
model checking for solving the tasks of finding any, all, and the best possible
pin configuration. We present results from a formal experiment applying the
declarative languages Alloy and Prolog to guide the process of engineering the
hardware/software interface for robotic platforms on the example of a
configuration complexity up to ten pins resulting in a configuration space
greater than 14.5 million possibilities. Our results show that our domain model
in Alloy performs better compared to Prolog to find feasible solutions
for larger configurations with an average time of 0.58s. To find the best
solution, our model for Prolog performs better taking only 1.38s for the
largest desired configuration; however, this important use case is currently not
covered by the existing tools for the hardware used as an example in this
article.
embedded systems
model-checking
software engineering
Alloy
Prolog