Speaker: Kristin-Yvonne Rozier, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University
Title: R2U2: Formal System Health Management for Autonomous Systems
Abstract: System Health Management (SHM) is becoming critical to the deployment of a wide range of systems, including aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, and rovers. The most useful, important, and safety-critical jobs will require these systems to operate both intelligently and autonomously, with the ability to sense and respond to both nominal and off-nominal conditions. Before deployment, it is essential that we enable reasoning sufficient to detect critical failures on-board; otherwise failure without warning may harm people, cause considerable property damage, or pollute a fragile or hazardous environment. Behavior specifications can be carried through from design time, or written specifically to reason about system run time and used for SHM. The Realizable, Responsive, Unobtrusive Unit (R2U2) analyzes specifications that combine temporal logics with probabilistic reasoning to provide formal assurances during runtime, enabling self-assessment of critical systems. Our goal is to enable intelligent autonomous operation through reliable diagnostics and prognostics while running aboard limited hardware and software, without affecting flight-certifiability. This presentation covers preliminary work from the NASA Early Career Faculty proposal, “Multi-Platform, Multi-Architecture Runtime Verification of Autonomous Space Systems.” We highlight recent advances in SHM with R2U2 and look toward the future, asking the question, how do we proceed safely from here?
Bio: Professor Kristin Yvonne Rozier heads the Laboratory for Temporal Logic in Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University; previously she spent 14 years as a Research Scientist at NASA and three semesters as an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. She earned her Ph.D. from Rice University and B.S. and M.S. degrees from The College of William and Mary. Dr. Rozier’s research focuses on automated techniques for the formal specification, validation, and verification of safety critical systems. Her primary research interests include: design-time checking of system logic and system requirements; runtime system health management; and safety and security analysis. Her advances in computation for the aerospace domain earned her many awards including: the NSF CAREER Award; the NASA Early Career Faculty Award; American Helicopter Society’s Howard Hughes Award; Women in Aerospace Inaugural Initiative-Inspiration-Impact Award; two NASA Group Achievement Awards; two NASA Superior Accomplishment Awards; Lockheed Martin Space Operations Lightning Award; AIAA’s Intelligent Systems Distinguished Service Award. She is an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a Senior Member of IEEE, ACM, and SWE. Dr. Rozier serves on the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee, where she chairs the Professional Development, Education, and Outreach subcommittee. She has served on the NASA Formal Methods Symposium Steering Committee since working to found that conference in 2008.