Robotics: A New Mission for FRET Requirements

Mobile robots are used to support planetary exploration and safety-critical environments such as nuclear plants. Central to the development of mobile robots is the specification of complex required behaviors known as missions. In this paper, we use NASA’s Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET) to specify functional robotic mission requirements. To examine the applicability of FRET in the mobile robotics domain, we studied robotic mission patterns specified in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). These patterns were originally derived from a large repository that included patterns from the literature and consultation with industrial experts. We extend this repository with those found during our extensive literature review. Although FRET has been successfully used in the past in case studies within the aerospace domain, mobile robot requirements present new challenges in their specification. To this end, our work provides a methodological basis for using FRET in the specification of robotic mission requirements.