Reverse Engineering of Middleware for Verification of Robot Control Architectures∗

Abstract

We consider the problem of automating the verification of dis-tributed control software relying on publish-subscribe middleware. In this scenario, the main challenge is that software correctness depends intrinsically on correct usage of middleware components, but struc-tured models of such components might not be available for analysis, e.g., because they are too large and complex to be described precisely in a cost-effective way. To overcome this problem, we propose to iden-tify abstract models of middleware as finite-state automata, and then to perform verification on the combined middleware and control soft-ware models. Both steps are carried out in a computer-assisted way using state-of-the-art techniques in automata-based identification and verification. Our main contribution is to show that the combination of identification and verification is feasible and useful when considering typical issues that arise in the implementation of distributed control software. 1