Towards Certification of Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Using Formal Model Checking and Simulation

Unmanned aircraft are expected to increase in use in civil applications over the coming years, particularly for the so-called dull, dirty and dangerous missions. Unmanned aircraft will undoubtedly require some form of autonomy in order to ensure safe operations: communications failure could render a completely human-piloted unmanned aircraft dangerous to other airspace users. In order to be used for civil applications, unmanned aircraft must gain government regulatory approval in a process known as certification. This paper presents an approach to gathering evidence for certification of autonomous unmanned aircraft based on formal methods (in particular formal model checking) and flight simulation. In particular, rational agent-based autonomous systems are examined. Rational agents for unmanned aircraft can be model checked using implicit models of the aircraft’s physical environment specified in terms of the different sensor inputs the autonomous system may receive. However this presents difficulties when trying to model check the agents relative to physical quantities such as those found in regulatory documents like the CAA Air Navigation Order. It is shown how this can be remedied using an explicit physical model of the environment within the model checker, and how this explicit physical model can itself be verified through comparison with flight simulations. To conclude, an overview of related and future work is given.