Arne Nordmann

NEURA Robotics

Context Ensuring safety for any sophisticated system is getting more complex due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless, using formal methods in industry is demanding because of their lack of usability and the difficulty of understanding verification re...

Context: Ensuring safety for any sophisticated system is getting more complex due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless, using formal methods in industry is demanding because of their lack of usability and the difficulty of understanding verification r...

The micro-ROS stack (micro.ros.org) integrates microcontrollers seamlessly with standard ROS 2 and brings all major ROS concepts such as nodes, publisher, subscriptions, parameters, and lifecycle onto deeply embedded systems. This enables accessing all software using the same ROS tools and APIs, regardless of the underlying computing hardware and o...

Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key takeaways that emerged from the discussion among the panelists and the workshop, ranging from architecting practi...

Context: Safety is of paramount importance for cyber–physical systems in domains such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Formal methods such as model checking are one way to ensure the safety of cyber–physical systems. However, adoption of formal methods in industry is hindered by usability issues, particularly the difficulty of understanding m...

Context: Safety is of paramount importance for cyber-physical systems in domains such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Formal methods such as model checking are one way to ensure the safety of cyber-physical systems. However, adoption of formal methods in industry is hindered by usability issues, particularly the difficulty of understanding m...

Context: The complexity of modern safety-critical systems in industries keep on increasing due to the rising number of features and functionalities. This calls for formal methods in order to entrust confidence in such systems. Nevertheless, using formal methods in industry is demanding because of usability issues, e.g., the difficulty of understand...

High-level deliberation in robotic systems has to handle three different but closely interwoven aspects simultaneously: intended tasks, contingencies, and system-level errors. To reduce the complexity, we propose the system modes concept, to abstract runtime state information and reconfiguration of the software components of the underlying layers b...

The importance of mission or safety critical software systems in many application domains of embedded systems is continuously growing, and so is the effort and complexity for reliability and safety analysis. Model driven development is currently one of the key approaches to cope with increasing development complexity, in general. Applying similar c...

The increasing complexity of safety critical systems and the shorter time-to-market requires a high degree of automation during all development phases from requirements specification to design, implementation, verification and safety assurance. To make this feasible, we need to describe different system aspects using appropriate models that are sem...

Contract-based design (CBD) is an emerging paradigm for complex systems, specifying the input-output behavior of a component by defining what the component guarantees, provided its environment satisfies the given assumptions. Under certain circumstances, it is possible to verify the decomposition of contracts to conclude the correctness of the top-...

Mastering the complexity of safety assurance for modern, software-intensive systems is challenging in several domains, such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Model-based safety analysis techniques show promising results to handle this challenge by automating the generation of required artifacts for an assurance case. In this work, we adapt pro...

With the recent boost in artificial intelligence, autonomous driving is one of the highly researched and invested areas. The focus of such work is not only constructing reliable (hardware) components but embedding intelligence into such components as well. For Bosch, a major supplier of automotive technologies, this has resulted in moving from bein...

To deal with the rising system complexity, Model-Based System Development (MBSD) approaches are becoming popular due to their promise to improve consistency between different views of the system model. For dependable systems, safety analysis is one of the important views. Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) can partially automate the generation of s...

To deal with the rising system complexity, Model-Based System Development (MBSD) approaches are becoming popular due to their promise to improve consistency between different views of the system model. For dependable systems, safety analysis is one of the important views. Model-Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) can partially automate the generation of s...

In order to deal with the rising complexity of safety-critical systems, model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approaches are becoming popular due to their promise to improve consistency between different views of the system model. Component Fault Trees (CFTs) are one particular technique to integrate the well-known Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) with a...

Language workbenches support the efficient creation, integration, and use of domain-specific languages. Typically, they execute models by code generation to programming language code. This can lead to increased productivity and higher quality. However, in safety-/mission-critical environments, generated code may not be considered trustworthy, becau...

In the paper Compositionality of Component Fault Trees, we present a discussion of the compositionality of correctness of component fault trees. In this technical report, we present the formal proof of the central theorem of the aforementioned publication.

Mastering the complexity of safety assurance for modern, software-intensive systems is challenging in several domains, such as automotive, robotics, and avionics. Model-based safety analysis techniques show promising results to handle this challenge by automating the generation of required artifacts for an assurance case. In this work, we adapt pro...

The complexity of safety-critical E/E-systems within the automotive domain are continuously increasing. At the same time, functional safety standards such as the ISO 26262 prescribe analysis methods like the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Currently, these analysis methods are mainly performed manually and ar...

We present Oncilla robot, a novel mobile, quadruped legged locomotion machine. This large-cat sized, 5.1 robot is one of a kind of a recent, bioinspired legged robot class designed with the capability of model-free locomotion control. Animal legged locomotion in rough terrain is clearly shaped by sensor feedback systems. Results with Oncilla robot...

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) ease the way to retrieve data from a network significantly by introducing content names that are independent from their physical location. However, in today’s implementations, producer and consumer need to agree on these names a priori in order to allow data retrieval. This circumstance hinders the adoption of ICN...

The importance of mission or safety critical software systems in many application domains of embedded systems is continuously growing, and so is the effort and complexity for reliability and safety analysis. Model driven development is currently one of the key approaches to cope with increasing development complexity, in general. Applying similar c...

The development of robotics systems requires a coherent design, implementation, and integration of multiple domain-specific software artifacts that provide the application-specific capabilities. Model-driven software development (MDSD) provides an efficient methodology that enables the design, integration, and verification of robotics applications...

Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that intrinsically raises many crosscutting concerns such as concurrency, uncertainty, and time constraints. These concerns make programming robotic systems challenging as expertise from multiple domains needs to be integrated conceptually and technically. Programming languages play a ce...

The development of robotics systems requires a coherent design, implementation, and integration of multiple domain-specific software artifacts that provide the application-specific capabilities. Model-driven software development (MDSD) provides an efficient methodology enabling the design, integration , and verification of robotics applications alr...

Automotive products increase in complexity as they evolve from driver assistance towards highly automated and autonomous driving. We propose model-driven engineering (MDE) as a basis for developing these complex systems. Our contribution to this topic is twofold: First, we identify and discuss challenges in adopting MDE to the specific needs of the...

The development of advanced robotic systems is challenging as expertise from multiple domains needs to be integrated conceptually and technically. Model-driven engineering promises an efficient and flexible approach for developing robotics applications that copes with this challenge. Domain-specific modeling allows to describe robotics concerns wit...

The Bionic Handling Assistant is one of the largest soft continuum robots and very special in being a pneumatically operated platform that is able to bend, stretch, and grasp in all directions. It nevertheless shares many challenges with smaller continuum and other softs robots such as parallel actuation, complex movement dynamics, slow pneumatic a...

This paper introduces a model-driven approach for engineering complex movement control architectures based on motion primitives, which in recent years have been a central development towards adaptive and flexible control of complex and compliant robots. We consider rich motor skills realized through the composition of motion primitives as our domai...

The design, simulation and programming of robotics systems is challenging as expertise from multiple domains needs to be integrated conceptually and technically. Domain-specific modeling promises an efficient and flexible concept for developing robotics applications that copes with this challenge. It allows to raise the level of abstraction through...

Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding performance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. While common robot har...

The presented work approaches programming of redundant robots such as the KUKA Lightweight Robot IV in a co-worker scenario from a user-centered point of view. It specifically asks, how the user’s implicit knowledge about the scene and the task can be transferred effectively to the robot through kinesthetic teaching. It proposes a new method to vis...

Facilitating efficient programming-by-demonstration methods for advanced robot systems is an ongoing research challenge. This paper addresses one important challenge in this area, which is the programming of kinematically redundant robots. We argue that standard programming-by-demonstration methods for teaching task-space trajectories on a redundan...

The recent advent of compliant and kinematically redundant robots poses new research challenges for human-robot interaction. While these robots provide a great degree of flexibility for the realiza- tion of complex applications, the flexibility gained generates the need for additional modeling steps and definition of criteria for redundancy resolut...

Model-driven software development is a promising way to cope with the complexity of system integration in advanced robotics, as it already demonstrated its benefits in domains with comparably challenging system integration requirements. This paper reports on work in progress in this area which aims to improve the research and experimentation proces...

A core idea of current European robotics research is that complex motor skills arise from combining adaptable movement primitives. This is challenging not only for reasons of the intrinsic complexity of the underlying control and architectural problems, but also due to the technological and conceptual fragmentation of the robotics domain. Our answe...

The emerging availability of high-quality software repositories for robotics promises to speed up the construction process of robotic systems through systematic reuse of software components. However, to reuse components without modification, compatibility at the interface level needs to be created, which is particularly hard if components were impl...

The Bionic Handling Assistant is a new continuum robot which is manufactured in a rapid-prototyping procedure out of elastic polyamide. Its mechanical flexibility and low weight provide an enormous potential for physical human robot interaction. Yet, the elasticity and parallel continuum actuation design challenge standard approaches to deal with a...

Model-driven software development is a promising way to cope with the complexity of system integration in advanced robotics, as it already demonstrated its benefits in domains with comparably challenging system integration requirements. This paper reports on work in progress in this area which aims to improve the research and experimentation proces...

A major goal of current robotics research is to enable robots to become co-workers that collaborate with humans efficiently and adapt to changing environments or workflows. We present an approach utilizing the physical interaction capabilities of compliant robots with data-driven and model-free learning in a coherent system in order to make fast re...

Robotics is a complex and interdisciplinary research area with growing interest. Many developers with different skills and focus areas work collaboratively. In our talk we will share our experience with a continuous integration strategy and a setup based on Jenkins for the development of robotic systems. We will give an overview about the complexit...

Die vorliegende Arbeit entwickelt ein bildbasiertes Roboterverhalten zur Korridorfolge und Kollisionsvermeidung in Innenraum-Umgebungen mit Hilfe von Methoden des maschinellen Lernens. Die Umfeldwahrnehmung basiert auf einem System aus einer Farbkamera, einem Time-of-Flight-Sensor und einer omnidirektionalen Kamera. Die Bilder in der Frontansicht u...