Resource-Performance Trade-off Analysis for Mobile Robot Design

Design of mobile autonomous robots is challenging due to the limited on-board resources such as processing power and energy source. A promising approach is to generate intelligent scheduling policies that trade off reduced resource consumption for a slightly lower but still acceptable level of performance. In this paper, we provide a framework to aid the designers in exploring such resource-performance trade-offs and finding schedules for mobile robots, guided by questions such as “given a resource budget, what guarantees can be provided on achievable performance”. The framework is based on quantitative multi-objective verification technique which, for a collection of possibly conflicting objectives, produces the Pareto front that contains all the optimal trade-offs that are achievable. The designer then selects a specific Pareto point based on the resource constraints and desired performance level, and a correct-by-construction schedule that meets those constraints is automatically generated. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework on several scenarios of a robot with complex dynamics, with encouraging results.