Rafael Cauê Cardoso

University of Aberdeen | ABDN · Department of Computing Science

Engineering a software system can be a complex process and prone to failure. This is exacerbated when the system under consideration presents some degree of autonomy, such as in cognitive agents. In this paper, we use runtime verification as a way to enforce safety properties on Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents by enveloping certain plans in sa...

In this paper we present an extension of Belief-Desire-Intention agents which can adapt their performance in response to changes in their environment. We consider situations in which the agent’s actions no longer perform as anticipated. Our agents maintain explicit descriptions of the expected behaviour of their actions, are able to track action pe...

The “Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition” (ARIAC) is an international robotic competition carried out in a simulated factory floor using ROS 2 (Robot Operating System)/Gazebo. Competitors control one gantry robot, four AGVs, and many other elements/devices, overcoming a range of agility challenges in this simulated environment, and...

In this paper, we discuss forward responsibilities in Belief-Desire-Intention agents, that is, responsibilities that can drive future decision-making. We focus on individual rather than global notions of responsibility. Our contributions include: (a) extended operational semantics for responsibility-aware rational agents; (b) hierarchical responsib...

Autonomous systems are often complex and prone to software failures and cyber-attacks. We introduce RVAFTs, an extension of Attack-Fault Trees (AFTs) with runtime events that can be used to construct runtime monitors. These monitors are able to detect when failures, that can be caused either by an attack or by a fault, occur. The safety and securit...

Multi-agent systems is an evolving discipline that encompasses many different branches of research. The long-standing Agents at Aberdeen ( A 3 ) group undertakes research across several areas of multi-agent systems, focusing in particular on aspects related to resilience, reliability, and coordination. In this article we introduce the group and hig...

This paper presents an extension of the Predictive Runtime Verification (PRV) paradigm to consider multiple models of the System Under Analysis (SUA). We call this extension Multi-Model PRV. Typically, PRV attempts to predict the satisfaction or violation of a property based on a trace and a (single) formal model of the SUA. However, contemporary n...

Robotic systems used in safety-critical industrial situations often rely on modular software architectures, and increasingly include autonomous components. Verifying that these modular robotic systems behave as expected requires approaches that can cope with, and preferably take advantage of, this inherent modularity. This paper describes a composi...

This volume contains the proceedings of the Second Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA 2022), co-located with the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022). The AREA workshop brings together researchers from autonomous...

Increasingly, BDI agents are being used not just for basic decision-making, but for more abstract ethical decisions. Several authors have built ad-hoc extensions of BDI systems that provide varying levels of sophistication. In this paper, we introduce a general-purpose approach for implementing ethical governors in BDI systems. With this we aim to...

We present an extension of the semantics for action execution in the Gwendolen BDI programming language. This extension firstly explicitly assumes that actions have durations and, moreover, that the reasoning cycle of the agent can not be stopped while such an action is executing but needs to continue in order to monitor for important external even...

Communication is a critical part of enabling multi-agent systems to cooperate. This means that applying formal methods to protocols governing communication within multi-agent systems provides useful confidence in its reliability. In this paper, we describe the formal verification of a complex communication protocol that coordinates agents merging m...

Manufacturers are looking for intelligent solutions to increase quality and productivity. Smart manufacturing envisions production empowered by autonomous robots that can complete tasks intelligently, with the focus on adaptability, flexibility, and versatility. In such systems, agile tasking plays an important role, as it is critical for robots to...

Runtime Verification is a lightweight formal verification technique. It is used to verify at runtime whether the system under analysis behaves as expected. The expected behaviour is usually formally specified by means of properties, which are used to automatically synthesise monitors. A monitor is a device that, given a sequence of events represent...

In this paper, we describe the strategies used by our team, MLFC, that led us to achieve the 2nd place in the 15th edition of the Multi-Agent Programming Contest. The scenario used in the contest is an extension of the previous edition (14th) ``Agents Assemble'' wherein two teams of agents move around a 2D grid and compete to assemble complex block...

In this paper, we describe the strategies used by our team, MLFC, that led us to achieve the 2\(^{nd}\) place in the 15\(^{th}\) edition of the Multi-Agent Programming Contest. The scenario used in the contest is an extension of the previous edition (14\(^{th}\)) “Agents Assemble” wherein two teams of agents move around a 2D grid and compete to ass...

There have been many attempts to integrate automated planning and rational agents. Most of the research focuses on adding support directly within agent programming languages, such as those based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model, rather than using off-the-shelf planners. This approach is often believed to improve the computation time, which is a...

Purpose of Review The deployment of hardware (e.g., robots, satellites, etc.) to space is a costly and complex endeavor. It is of extreme importance that on-board systems are verified and validated through a variety of verification and validation techniques, especially in the case of autonomous systems. In this paper, we discuss a number of approac...

The study of autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint [...]

Communication is a critical part of enabling multi-agent systems to cooperate. This means that applying formal methods to protocols governing communication within multi-agent systems provides useful confidence in its reliability. In this paper, we describe the formal verification of a complex communication protocol that coordinates agents merging m...

Multi-agent systems, robotics and software engineering are large and active research areas with many applications in academia and industry. The First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA), organised the first time in 2020, aims at encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations and exchange of ideas among researchers w...

When applying formal verification to a system that interacts with the real world, we must use a model of the environment. This model represents an abstraction of the actual environment, so it is necessarily incomplete and hence presents an issue for system verification. If the actual environment matches the model, then the verification is correct;...

The advent of sophisticated robotics and AI technology makes sending humans into hazardous and distant environments to carry out inspections increasingly avoidable. Being able to send a robot, rather than a human, into a nuclear facility or deep space is very appealing. However, building these robotic systems is just the start and we still need to...

Task agility is an increasingly desirable feature for robots in application domains such as manufacturing. The Canonical Robot Command Language (CRCL) is a lightweight information model built for agile tasking of robotic systems. CRCL replaces the underlying complex proprietary robot programming interface with a standard interface. In this paper, w...

Intelligent and autonomous agents is a subarea of symbolic artificial intelligence where these agents decide, either reactively or proactively, upon a course of action by reasoning about the information that is available about the world (including the environment, the agent itself, and other agents). It encompasses a multitude of techniques, such a...

Recently, robotic applications have been seeing widespread use across industry, often tackling safety-critical scenarios where software reliability is paramount. These scenarios often have unpredictable environments and, therefore, it is crucial to be able to provide assurances about the system at runtime. In this paper, we introduce ROSMonitoring,...

Software engineering of modular robotic systems is a challenging task, however, verifying that the developed components all behave as they should individually and as a whole presents its own unique set of challenges. In particular, distinct components in a modular robotic system often require different verification techniques to ensure that they be...

The 2019 Multi-Agent Programming Contest introduced a new scenario, Agents Assemble, where two teams of agents move around a 2D grid and compete to assemble complex block structures. In this paper, we describe the strategies used by our team that led us to achieve first place in the contest. Our strategies tackle some of the major challenges in the...

The Curiosity rover is one of the most complex systems successfully deployed in a planetary exploration mission to date. It was sent by NASA to explore the surface of Mars and to identify potential signs of life. Even though it has limited autonomy on-board, most of its decisions are made by the ground control team. This hinders the speed at which...

Long-term autonomy requires autonomous systems to adapt as their capabilities no longer perform as expected. To achieve this, a system must first be capable of detecting such changes. In this position paper, we describe a system architecture for BDI autonomous agents capable of adapting to changes in a dynamic environment and outline the required r...

This volume contains the proceedings of the First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA 2020), co-located with the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020). AREA brings together researchers from autonomous agents, software engineering and robotic communities, as combining knowledge coming from t...

Long-term autonomy requires autonomous systems to adapt as their capabilities no longer perform as expected. To achieve this, a system must first be capable of detecting such changes. In this position paper, we describe a system architecture for BDI autonomous agents capable of adapting to changes in a dynamic environment and outline the required r...

The Curiosity rover is one of the most complex systems successfully deployed in a planetary exploration mission to date. It was sent by NASA to explore the surface of Mars and to identify potential signs of life. Even though it has limited autonomy on-board, most of its decisions are made by the ground control team. This hinders the speed at which...

One of the major advantages of modular architectures in robotic systems is the ability to add or replace nodes, without needing to rearrange the whole system. In this type of system, autonomous agents can aid in the decision making and high-level control of the robot. For example, a robot may have a module for each of the effectors and sensors that...

The 2019 Multi-Agent Programming Contest introduced a new scenario, Agents Assemble, where two teams of agents move around a 2D grid and compete to assemble complex block structures. In this paper, we describe the strategies used by our team that led us to achieve first place in the contest. Our strategies tackle some of the major challenges in the...

Autonomy has been one of the most desirable features for robotic applications in recent years. This is evidenced by a recent surge of research in autonomous driving cars, strong government funding for research in robotics for extreme environments, and overall progress in service robots. Autonomous decision-making is often at the core of these syste...

Ensuring that autonomous space robot control software behaves as it should is crucial, particularly as software failure in space often equates to mission failure and could potentially endanger nearby astronauts and costly equipment. To minimise mission failure caused by software errors, we can utilise a variety of tools and techniques to verify tha...

The Multi-Agent Programming Contest in 2018 expanded upon the Agents in the City scenario used in the 2016 and 2017 editions of the contest. In this scenario two teams compete to score points by building and attacking wells using realistic city maps from OpenStreetMap. Wells are the main addition to the new version of the scenario; they cost money...

The Multi-Agent Programming Contest in 2017 expanded upon the Agents in the City scenario used in the 2016 edition of the contest. In the Agents in the City contest, two teams compete to accomplish logistic tasks in simulations using realistic city maps from OpenStreetMap. The new version of the scenario shifted emphasis to include jobs that requir...

An important problem of automated planning is validating if a plan complies with the domain model. Such validation is straightforward for classical sequential planning but until recently there was no plan validation approach for Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN). In this paper we propose a novel technique for validating HTN plans by parsing of attri...

Multi-agent systems often contain dynamic and complex environments where agents' course of action (plans) can fail at any moment during execution of the system. Furthermore, new goals can emerge for which there are no known plan available in any of the agents' plan library. Automated planning techniques are well suited to tackle both of these issue...

Describing planning domains using a common formalism promotes greater reuse of research, allowing a fairer comparison between different planners and approaches. Common planning formalisms for single-agent planning are already well established (e.g., PDDL, STRIPS, and HTN), but currently there is a shortage of multi-agent planning formalisms with cl...

Over the past few years there have been several advances in distributed systems, and more recently multi-core processors. Consequently, a natural need for concurrent and parallel programming languages arises. In this paper, we compare some aspects of two concurrency models, Actors and Agents, using benchmarks to evaluate: (i) the communication perf...

This paper presents some results of communication benchmarks used to compare the performance of one agent-oriented and two actor-oriented programming languages. The experiments include an existing benchmark for traditional programming languages as well as two new variants of that benchmark. We selected Erlang and Scala to represent actor languages,...

This project intends to integrate two study fields from Artificial Intelligence - Robotics and Intelligent Agents. The purpose of this paper is the planning of actions and perceptions of BDI intelligent agents for the brand of robots LEGO Mindstorms NXT. In order to achieve that purpose it is utilized the Jason framework for multi-agent programming...