An Interface for Programming Verifiable Autonomous Agents in ROS

Autonomy has been one of the most desirable features for robotic applications in recent years. This is evidenced by a recent surge of research in autonomous driving cars, strong government funding for research in robotics for extreme environments, and overall progress in service robots. Autonomous decision-making is often at the core of these systems, thus, it is important to be able to verify and validate properties that relate to the correct behaviour that is expected of the system. Our main contribution in this paper, is an interface for integrating BDI-based agents into robotic systems developed using ROS. We use the Gwendolen language to program our BDI agents and to make use of the AJPF model checker in order to verify properties related to the decision-making in the agent programs. Our case studies include 3D simulations using a simple autonomous patrolling behaviour of a TurtleBot, and multiple TurtleBots servicing a house that can cooperate with each other in case of failure.