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Verification of Periodically Controlled Hybrid Systems: Application to an Autonomous Vehicle

Published:01 August 2012Publication History
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Abstract

This article introduces Periodically Controlled Hybrid Automata (PCHA) for modular specification of embedded control systems. In a PCHA, control actions that change the control input to the plant occur roughly periodically, while other actions that update the state of the controller may occur in the interim. Such actions could model, for example, sensor updates and information received from higher-level planning modules that change the set point of the controller. Based on periodicity and subtangential conditions, a new sufficient condition for verifying invariant properties of PCHAs is presented. For PCHAs with polynomial continuous vector fields, it is possible to check these conditions automatically using, for example, quantifier elimination or sum of squares decomposition. We examine the feasibility of this automatic approach on a small example. The proposed technique is also used to manually verify safety and progress properties of a fairly complex planner-controller subsystem of an autonomous ground vehicle. Geometric properties of planner-generated paths are derived which guarantee that such paths can be safely followed by the controller.

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                • Published in

                  cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
                  ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems  Volume 11, Issue S2
                  Special Section on CAPA'09, Special Section on WHS'09, and Special Section VCPSS' 09
                  August 2012
                  396 pages
                  ISSN:1539-9087
                  EISSN:1558-3465
                  DOI:10.1145/2331147
                  Issue’s Table of Contents

                  Copyright © 2012 ACM

                  Publisher

                  Association for Computing Machinery

                  New York, NY, United States

                  Publication History

                  • Published: 1 August 2012
                  • Accepted: 1 June 2010
                  • Revised: 1 January 2010
                  • Received: 1 May 2009
                  Published in tecs Volume 11, Issue S2

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