Engineering the Hardware/Software Interface for Robotic Platforms – A Comparison of Applied Model Checking with Prolog and Alloy

Abstract

Robotic platforms serve different use cases ranging from experimentsfor prototyping assistive applications up to embedded systems for realizingcyber-physical systems in various domains. We are using 1:10 scaleminiature vehicles as a robotic platform to conduct research in the domainof self-driving cars and collaborative vehicle fleets. Thus, experimentswith different sensors like e.g. ultra-sonic, infrared, and rotary encoders needto be prepared and realized using our vehicle platform. For each setup, we needto configure the hardware/software interface board to handle all sensors andactors. Therefore, we need to find a specific configuration setting for eachpin of the interface board that can handle our current hardware setupbut which is also flexible enough to support further sensors or actors forfuture use cases. In this paper, we show how to model the domain of theconfiguration space for a hardware/software interface board to enablemodel checking for solving the tasks of finding any, all, and the best possiblepin configuration. We present results from a formal experiment applying thedeclarative languages Alloy and Prolog to guide the process of engineering thehardware/software interface for robotic platforms on the example of aconfiguration complexity up to ten pins resulting in a configuration spacegreater than 14.5 million possibilities. Our results show that our domain modelin Alloy performs better compared to Prolog to find feasible solutionsfor larger configurations with an average time of 0.58s. To find the bestsolution, our model for Prolog performs better taking only 1.38s for thelargest desired configuration; however, this important use case is currently notcovered by the existing tools for the hardware used as an example in thisarticle