Rule-based Dynamic Safety Monitoring for Mobile Robots

—Safety is a key challenge in robotics, in particular for mobile robots operating in an open and unpredictable environment.
Safety certification is desired for commercial robots, but no existing approaches for addressing the safety challenge provide a clearly
specified and isolated safety layer, defined in an easily understandable way for facilitating safety certification. In this paper, we propose
that functional-safety-critical concerns regarding the robot software be explicitly declared separately from the main program, in terms
of externally observable properties of the software. Concretely, we use a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to declaratively specify a
set of safety-related rules that the software must obey, as well as corresponding corrective actions that trigger when rules are violated.
Our DSL, integrated with ROS, is shown to be capable of specifying safety-related constraints, and is experimentally demonstrated
to enforce safety behaviour in existing robot software. We believe our approach could be extended to other fields to similarly simplify
safety certification.