On the Use of Safety Certification Practices in Autonomous Field Robot Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Robotics has recently seen an increasing development, and the areas addressed within robotics has extended into domains we consider safety-critical, fostering the development of standards that facilitate the development of safe robots. Safety standards describe concepts to maintain desired reactions or performance in malfunctioning systems, and influence industry regarding software development and project management. However, academia seemingly did not reach the same degree of utilisation of standards. This paper presents the findings from a systematic mapping study in which we study the state-of-the-art in developing software for safety-critical software for autonomous field robots. The purpose of the study is to identify practices used for the development of autonomous field robots and how these practices relate to available safety standards. Our findings from reviewing 49 papers show that standards, if at all, are barely used. The majority of the papers propose various solutions to achieve safety, and about half of the papers refer to non-standardised approaches that mainly address the methodical rather than the development level. The present study thus shows an emerging field still on the quest for suitable approaches to develop safety-critical software, awaiting appropriate standards for this support.