Convince Project

December 2024 Newsletter: Advancing Robust Robot Deliberation From the first release of our open-source toolchain to workshops, research, and awards, it’s been an incredible year for the CONVINCE Project—and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing partners and supporters! ✨ Check out our December newsletter for highlights and updates #CONVINCEProject #Robotics #AI #RobotDeliberation #Innovation #OpenSource #Research #AutonomousSystems #ArtificialIntelligence #RobotDevelopment #Collaboration #Engineering #TechInnovation #FutureOfWork #CONVINCEProject #HorizonEurope #RobotTechnology #Teamwork

As we power down for the holidays (just a little!), we want to close by thanking our amazing community of partners, developers, and followers for making this year one to remember! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season! Let’s make 2025 a year of even greater achievements in robotics and innovation. #merrychristmas #seasonsgreetings #newyearnewgoals #Robotics #Innovation #CONVINCEProject

This week, we wanted to provide a more in-depth look at the CONVINCE Project’s recent paper – ‘Towards a Verifiable Toolchain for Robotics’ – which won the Best Paper Award at the recent #AAAI Fall Symposium! 🏆 This paper highlights our project’s progress, methodology, and results so far, alongside a look at the real-world case studies of CONVINCE. You can read the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/erddq-yF Here's an overview: CONVINCE is developing a software toolchain that aids developers in designing, developing, and deploying fully verified robotic deliberation systems. The paper describes our modelling approach, each of the toolchain components, and how they interact. 👉 The CONVINCE toolchain can: - Determine the robot behaviours required for a #context-dependent mission - Deploy and configure the components required for these behaviours - Automate the analysis of these behaviours using #formal modelling and #verification to ensure safety and robustness ⛓️Toolchain components: - Situation understanding, planning and anomaly recovery tools to help robots define unknown anomalies and recover from them. - Formal verification to evaluate the robustness of the complete robot architecture offline and online - Modelling formalisms for robotic systems which can be used to generate executable code - Statistical model checkers that verify metric temporal logic properties on the system models both offline and online. - Runtime monitors that check for property or model violations in real-time using input from the actual system. Contributors: Charlie Street, Yazz Warsame, Masoumeh (Iran) Mansoori, Michaela Klauck, Christian Henkel, Marco Lampacrescia, Matteo Palmas, Ralph Lange, Enrico G., Armando Tacchella, Razane A., Raphaël Lallement, Matteo Morelli, Ginny Chen-Jorgensen, Danielle Wallis, Stefano Bernagozzi, Stefano Rosa, Marco Randazzo, Sofia Faraci, Lorenzo Natale. Bosch Research Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia University of Birmingham Università degli Studi di Genova Fondazione Torino Musei Timelex Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives CLEIA Comune di Torino Inventya Ltd AGIMUS Project Robotics4EU PILLAR-Robots IntelliMan Project CORESENSE RegoProject Sestosenso AI-on-Demand Platform Adra - AI-Data-Robotics-Association MOZART #URRAD #AAAI #Robotics #CONVINCE #Innovation #formalmethods #modelchecking

📣 In this month's Meet the CONVINCE Developer edition, we would like to feature Stefano Bernagozzi, PhD Student at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). 🔎 To learn more about Stefano's robotics journey, read the article below. 📌 Don't forget to follow us for more updates on the CONVINCE project and our awesome team! Bosch Research Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia University of Birmingham Università degli Studi di Genova Fondazione Torino Musei Timelex Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives CLEIA Comune di Torino Inventya Ltd AGIMUS Project Robotics4EU PILLAR-Robots IntelliMan Project CORESENSE RegoProject Sestosenso AI-on-Demand Platform Adra - AI-Data-Robotics-Association MOZART #ConvinceProject #Robotics #AutonomousSystems #AI #RoboticsDevelopers #Innovation #RoboticsEngineering #Technology #OpenSource #HorizonEurope

🌟We wrapped up our second review meeting for the project last week! 🌟 A huge thank you to our reviewers Marc Hanheide and Malik Ghallab for their constructive feedback and engaging discussions, a special thanks also goes to Eren Gultekin and Olivier Da Costa. Thank you to our Project Partners for your invaluable contributions – your expertise and collaboration continues to drive our project forward. We look forward to the next year of milestones, events and development! Swipe through the photos highlights 👇 Ralph Lange, Michaela Klauck, Christian Henkel, Matteo Palmas, Marco Lampacrescia (Bosch Research), Razane A., Matteo Morelli, Raphaël Lallement, Adel Mhiri, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso, Boris Meden (CEA), Armando Tacchella, Enrico G., Karim Pedemonte (Università degli Studi di Genova), Masoumeh (Iran) Mansoori, Charlie Street, Yazz Warsame (University of Birmingham), Lorenzo Natale, Marco Randazzo, Stefano Bernagozzi, Sofia Faraci (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia), Ginny Chen-Jorgensen (Inventya Ltd), Timelex ,CLEIA, Fondazione Torino Musei #CONVINCEProject #AutonomousSystems #Robotics #HorizonEurope #Collaboration #ResearchandDevelopment #InnovationinAction

🌟 Congratulations to Charlie Street for winning the Best Paper Award at the #AAAI Fall Symposium on Unified Representation for Robotic Application Development (UR-RAD)! 🏆 The paper, "Towards a Verifiable Toolchain for Robotics," represents a collaborative effort from the Convince Project partners to develop a software toolchain that supports developers in designing and deploying robot deliberation system that are fully verified.  We describe our model-driven approach, each of the toolchain components, and how they interact. We also discuss survey results which demonstrate the demand for a verifiable toolchain among the robotics community. This recognition highlights the impact of collaboration and thoughtful innovation. Well done to everyone involved! 🔗 You can access the paper https://lnkd.in/eZJAGdeB A big thank you to the organizers of the UR-RAD 24.  #URRAD #AAAI #Robotics #CONVINCE #Innovation #formalmethod #modelchecking

Great to see Ralph Lange from Bosch Research discuss the Industrial PhD program at Bosch and the Italian phDRIM in this interview with Il Secolo XIX. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/eqf7CPju

🚀 SMC Storm: Advancing Statistical Model Checking for Complex Robotic Systems Last week at AISoLA 2024, Marco Lampacrescia from Bosch Research presented SMC Storm, a new Statistical Model Checking tool developed under the CONVINCE Project, based on the renowned Probabilistic Model Checker, Storm. Tailored for complex systems, SMC Storm makes verification faster and more efficient by combining multi-threading, statistical methods, and specialised optimisations—ideal for large-scale robotic applications. Key Features: 👉 Multi-Threading & Statistical Sampling: Supports multi-threaded processing, with ongoing improvements planned to enhance multi-threading efficiency further. 👉  Performance optimisation: SMC-Storm leverages caching to reduce redundant operations, like state-expansion. 👉 Statistical Analysis Methods: Offers various fixed-sample and sequential methods for determining required traces and computing results. 👉 Model Format Support: Compatible with JANI and PRISM formats, making it adaptable for various use cases. 💡 Performance Highlights: Benchmarking evaluations show that SMC-Storm is currently the fastest SMC tool for evaluating both probability and expected reward properties on discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) models, whilst not sacrificing accuracy. 🧠 Future Enhancements: Further improvements will be made to memory efficiency and improved multi-threading mechanisms will be evaluated. Upcoming updates will focus on expanding SMC Storm’s functionality to verify more complex behaviours, furthering its application in industrial settings. The tool is open source and you can find the latest release and access the full documentation on GitHub - https://lnkd.in/eC39rmwS. For developers interested in applying model checking to robotics use cases, check out our tools in AS2FM: https://lnkd.in/eCiddkHh. AS2FM (Autonomous Systems to Formal Models) introduces a new SCXML-based modeling language designed to model robotics systems and provides tools to convert them to the JANI format, in which system models can be verified using SMC Storm. Special thanks to the AISoLA organisers and sponsors of this valuable event (EasyConferences, University of Dortmund, Springer Nature, Center for Perspicuous Computing, Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, Lamarr Institute). Swipe to see some photos from Marco’s presentation at AISoLA 2024. 👇 Bosch Research Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia University of Birmingham Università degli Studi di Genova Fondazione Torino Musei Timelex Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives CLEIA Comune di Torino Inventya Ltd AGIMUS Project Robotics4EU PILLAR-Robots IntelliMan Project CORESENSE RegoProject Sestosenso AI-on-Demand Platform Adra - AI-Data-Robotics-Association MOZART #AISoLA2024 #RoboticsVerification #StatisticalModelChecking #SMCStorm #RoboticsResearch #AIResearch #CONVINCEProject

✨ Last week, Charlie Street and Masoumeh (Iran) Mansoori presented their research at the ECAI-27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Spain. We are happy to share with you a couple of action shots from the day! One of the presentations focused on their recent publication, ‘'Covered for Life: Lifelong Area Coverage Under Spatiotemporal Uncertainty,‘' which introduces a framework for lifelong area coverage in dynamic environments, where robots continuously adapt to changes in spatiotemporal occupancy—ultimately improving how robots navigate under uncertainty. You can view the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/e6Xfvq6u A special thanks to the organisers for a great event - European Association for Artificial Intelligence EurAI and the Spanish AI Society (AEPIA), and the hosts, CiTIUS (Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes) and the Intelligent Systems Group. Also, congratulations to the other participants for their informative talks and research spotlights - (Ana Ozaki, Guillermo Infante Molina, Anders Jonsson, Vicenç Gómez Cerdà, Giovanni Varricchione, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani, Brian Logan, Thorsten Klößner, Alvaro Torralba, Marcel Steinmetz, Silvan Sievers, Gabriel Paludo Licks, Fabio Patrizi, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Chaahat Jain, Lorenzo Cascioli, Laurens D., Marcel Vinzent, Jesse Davis, Jörg Hoffmann, Ronit Bustin, Claudia Goldman-Shenhar, Gregory Hyde, Eugene Santos, Alex Stephens, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes). #ECAI2024 #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #UniversityOfBirmingham #CONVINCE   Bosch Research Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia University of Birmingham Università degli Studi di Genova Fondazione Torino Musei Timelex Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives CLEIA Comune di Torino Inventya Ltd

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in and contributed to the Deliberation Workshop at #ROSCon2024 yesterday! 🎉 🤖 Thank you to Christian, Matthias, Sebastian, Davide, David O. and David Conner for sharing their expertise and guiding participants through an engaging day of hands-on learning. Throughout the day, the participants were guided step-by-step to help increase their understanding of behaviour trees, finite-state machines, task planning, and verification and validation systems, while applying deliberation tools to solve different robotic problems.  To showcase the diversity of the tools, participants had the opportunity to tackle predefined tasks using deliberation technologies such as BehaviorTree.CPP, FlexBE, ros_bt_py, SkiROS2, and the AS2FM tool by CONVINCE, guided by the maintainers of the tools.  The workshop provided a unique opportunity for participants to explore how different tools can be applied to solve a variety of robotic challenges, helping them gain insights into which approaches are most suitable for their specific projects. The day concluded with a reflective session in which participants shared their experiences, challenges, and insights. Stay tuned for more developments, we hope to have some analysis on the participant survey to share with you soon! ✨ Bosch Research Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia University of Birmingham Università degli Studi di Genova Fondazione Torino Musei Timelex Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives CLEIA Comune di Torino Inventya Ltd AGIMUS Project Robotics4EU PILLAR-Robots IntelliMan Project CORESENSE RegoProject Sestosenso AI-on-Demand Platform Adra - AI-Data-Robotics-Association MOZART #ROSCon2024 #AutonomousSystems #Robotics #Odense