Issue link: https://htpgraphics.uberflip.com/i/1385717
VERIFICATION & VALIDATION RAIN PROGRESS // During the collaboration with the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), we held two full-day workshops, and produced a white paper containing guidance about overcoming the assurance challenges posed by autonomous robotic systems. The first workshop explored how the safety of robotics is assessed by the ONR and how to present assurance evidence for autonomous robotics. The second workshop discussed the current hazards and the hazards of future autonomous systems, in the context of four concrete case studies provided by organisations including the National Nuclear Laboratory and Sellafield Ltd. The workshops were attended by a variety of stakeholders. The discussions from the workshops prompted the white paper, which we have drafted in extensive collaboration with the ONR. The white paper introduces prerequisite ideas, such as autonomy, ethical impacts, and software verification. It then describes development and verification principles for dealing with some of autonomous system's unique challenges. The white paper aims to bring together information that is useful to all the stakeholder groups, to provide a common basis on which to move forward. Some of the principles describe how to adapt existing software engineering or verification methods for autonomous systems; others introduce new criteria to check, which are novel for autonomous systems. FUTURE ASPIRATIONS // The next steps for this strand of work involve developing more concrete guidance about how to realise the abstract principles from the white paper. For example, step-by-step guides for development approaches and verification methodologies, the development of generic autonomous systems' architectures that enable meaningful verification, or case studies for using types of verification that have seen less up-take by industry, such as Formal Methods. Other, wider follow-on work involves things that were briefly introduced in the white paper, but where generally out of scope. For example, the materials that robotic systems are built from often make them unsuitable for use in radioactive environments, so detailed guidance could be provided about which materials are suitable, and how choice of materials will impact the capability of the robot. Also, the ethical impacts of the introduction and use of autonomous systems needs further collaborative exploration, as does the legal implications for responsibility for failures of these systems when there is no longer a clear 'user'. 23