Formal Verification of Process Communications in Operational Flight Program for a Small-Scale Unmanned Helicopter

Formal verification plays an important role in demonstrating safety and correctness of safety-critical systems such as airplanes and helicopters. Small-scale unmanned helicopters have been increasingly developed and deployed for various scientific, commercial and defense applications. The HELISCOPE project is aiming to develop an unmanned helicopter and its on-flight embedded computing system for navigation and real-time transmission of the motion video using wireless communication schemes. This paper introduces our experience on the formal verification of OFP (Operational Flight Program) in the HELISCOPE project. The OFP provides real-time controls with various sensors and actuators, and should be sufficiently verified through formal verification techniques. We focused on the formal verification of process communications between four sensing processes and one controller to access a critical section of shared memory area mutually exclusively.