Verification of Autonomous Systems

Signe Redfield is the Director of the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).  She has served as Co-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committees for Verification of Autonomous Systems (TC-VAS) and Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Robotic and Automation Systems (TC-PEBRAS).  She co-authored the first IEEE RAS standard, 1872-2015, and served as Secretary for standard 1872.1-2024, “Robot Task Representation”.  She was detailed to the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) as the acting lead of their Test and Assessment group in 2019, and returned to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Space Technology Division’s Robotics and Machine Learning Section where she developed assurance cases and supported the development of verification and testing tools for autonomous systems.  She designed the Payload Mission Manager software component for DARPA’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program, which integrates the payload fault management system with operator generated automated, supervised, and fully autonomous behavior scripts.  She served as the NRL RSGS Algorithms lead from 2014-2017 and the de facto Fault Management lead from 2015-2019.  Before her arrival at NRL in 2014, she spent three years in London as the ONR Global Associate Director for Autonomy and Unmanned Systems.  Prior to her term at ONR Global, Dr. Redfield worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division in Florida where she worked on heterogeneous teams of autonomous maritime vehicles and led the development of a new architecture, enabling the simulation and testing of a variety of arbitration mechanisms to control teams of vehicles.

• Part I Introduction.- Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Verification Challenges.- Part II Theoretical Approaches.- Chater 3 Assuring Autonomy Using MBSE, Formal Methods, and the Best Agile/DevOps Practices.- Chapter 4 Specification of Autonomous Behavior.- Chapter 5 A Philosophical and Mathematical Framework for Associated Problems of Hierarchical Verification of Autonomous Systems.- Chapter 6 Structuring Learning-enabled Robot Control to Support Verification.- Part III Practical Considerations.- Chapter 7 Verification Test Methods and Metrics.- Chapter 8 Review on Verification for Marine Autonomous Systems.- Chapter 9 Performance Boundary Identification and Automated Test Plan Development.- Chapter 10 Designing and Assuring Spacecraft Autonomy.- Chapter 11 Evaluating Autonomous Systems.- Index.