Preface

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).

Autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint. Nonetheless, the application of agents in real-world scenarios has largely been adopted in applications which are primarily software based, and remains limited in applications which involve physical interaction. In parallel, robots are no longer used only in tightly constrained industrial applications but are instead being applied in an increasing number of domains, ranging from robotic assistants to search and rescue, where the working environment is both dynamic and underspecified, and may involve interactions between multiple robots and humans.

This presents significant challenges to traditional software engineering methodologies. Increased autonomy is an important route to enabling robotic applications to function in these environments, and autonomous agents and multi-agent systems are a promising approach to their engineering. As autonomy and interaction increases, the engineering of reliable behaviour becomes more challenging (both in robotic applications and in more traditional autonomous agent settings), and so there is a need for research into new approaches to verification and validation that can be integrated in the engineering lifecycle of these systems.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from the autonomous agents and the robotics communities, since combining knowledge from these two research areas may lead to innovative approaches that solve complex problems related to the verification and validation of autonomous robotic systems.

In this second edition of the workshop, we received a total of 9 submissions, and accepted 7 full and one short papers; we thank all the authors that have submitted their valuable work to our workshop.

We would also like to thank the work of our 25 program committee members (complete list available below) that provided helpful feedback that was then used to improve the papers, and the support of the EPTCS staff in preparing this proceedings.

Finally, we would like to thank our two invited speakers, Brian Logan and Ana Cavalcanti. The title and abstract of their presentations can be found below.

For more information about the workshop, please check our website: https://areaworkshop.github.io/AREA2022/

The AREA 2022 organisers,
Rafael C. Cardoso, Angelo Ferrando, Fabio Papacchini, Mehrnoosh Askarpour, and Louise A. Dennis

Program Committee

• Tobias Ahlbrecht, Clausthal University of Technology (Germany)
• Gleifer Vaz Alves, Federal University of Technology — Paraná (Brazil)
• Amel Bennaceur, The Open University (UK)
• Olivier Boissier, Mines Saint-Étienne (France)
• Rafael H. Bordini, PUCRS (Brazil)
• Daniela Briola, University of Milano Bicocca (Italy)
• Jomi F. Hübner, UFSC (Brazil)
• Erez Karpas, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)
• Bruno Lacerda, University of Oxford (UK)
• Charles Lesire, ONERA (French Aerospace Lab) (France)
• Sven Linker, Lancaster University Leipzig (Germany)
• Livia Lestingi, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
• Brian Logan, University of Aberdeen (UK)
• Matt Luckcuck, Maynooth University (Ireland)
• Vadim Malvone, Telecom Paris (France)
• Viviana Mascardi, Genoa University (Italy)
• Felipe Meneguzzi, University of Aberdeen (UK)
• Claudio Menghi, McMaster University (Canada)
• Eva Onaindia, Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain)
• Fabrizio Pastore, SnT Centre for Security Reliability and Trust (Luxembourg)
• Terry Payne, University of Liverpool (UK)
• Mohammad Mehdi Pourhashem, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran (Iran)
• Pedro Ribeiro, University of York (UK)
• Matteo Rossi, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
• Christos Tsigkanos, Technical University of Vienna (Austria)

Synthesis of Fail-Safe Behaviours

Reactive synthesis techniques have been proposed as a way to automate the production of software for autonomous cyber-physical systems. Such techniques have the advantage that the resulting software is guaranteed to realise a given target behaviour if the behaviour and models of the resources provided as input are themselves correct. However, if the target specifies an unsafe behaviour, or the resource operations are unsafe, incorrectly programmed or the resource models fail to anticipate some failure modes, then synthesis may result in a "correct", but unsafe controller. In this talk, I present an approach to the synthesis of fail-safe controllers that orchestrate the activities of a set of resources to realise a target behaviour, and in addition guarantee the resulting behaviour conforms to a fail-safe specification defining what should happen if an abnormal event occurs.

RoboWorld: Assumption Language for Robotic Systems

Robots affect and are affected by the environment. Operational requirements often restrict the conditions in which a robot can be used, and many of the expected and desirable properties of a robotic system depend on properties of its environment. Defining a complete model of the environment is not possible, in general, but it is possible to capture assumptions about the environment. We will present a controlled natural language called RoboWorld that can be used to define (a) the operational requirements of a robot, and (b) how the robot interacts with its environment. RoboWorld has a hybrid process-algebraic semantics. RoboWorld is part of the RoboStar framework of domain-specific languages, and plays a central role in proof, simulation, and testing of robotic systems.