Modelling the Turtle Python library in CSP

Dara MacConville
Marie Farrell
Matt Luckcuck
Rosemary Monahan

Software verification is an important tool in establishing the reliability of critical systems. One potential area of application is in the field of robotics, as robots take on more tasks in both day-to-day areas and highly specialised domains. Robots are usually given a plan to follow, if there are errors in this plan the robot will not perform reliably. The capability to check plans for errors in advance could prevent this. Python is a popular programming language in the robotics domain, through the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and various other libraries. Python's Turtle package provides a mobile agent, which we formally model here using Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Our interactive toolchain CSP2Turtle with CSP model and Python components, enables Turtle plans to be verified in CSP before being executed in Python. This means that certain classes of errors can be avoided, and provides a starting point for more detailed verification of Turtle programs and more complex robotic systems. We illustrate our approach with examples of robot navigation and obstacle avoidance in a 2D grid-world.

In Rafael C. Cardoso, Angelo Ferrando, Fabio Papacchini, Mehrnoosh Askarpour and Louise A. Dennis: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA 2022), Vienna, Austria, 24th July 2022, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 362, pp. 15–22.
Published: 20th July 2022.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.362.4 bibtex PDF
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