Formal verification applied to robotic surgery

In this essay, we discuss the application of formal methods for the verification of properties of control systems designed for autonomous robotic systems. We illustrate our proposal in the context of surgery by considering the automatic execution of a simple action such as puncturing. To prove that a sequence of subtasks planned on preoperative data can successfully accomplish the surgical operation despite model uncertainties, we specify the problem by using hybrid automata. We express the requirements of interest as questions about reachability properties of the hybrid automaton model. Then, we compare the different performance of current state-of-the-art tools for reachability analysis of hybrid automata.