Co-simulation of Semi-autonomous Systems: The Line Follower Robot Case Study

Semi-autonomous systems are capable of sensing their environment and perform their tasks autonomously, but they may also be supervised by humans. The shared manual/automatic control makes the dynamics of such systems more complex, and undesirable and hardly predictable behaviours can arise from human-machine interaction. When these systems are used in critical applications, such as autonomous driving or robotic surgery, the identification of conditions that may lead the system to violate safety requirements is of main concern, since people actually entrust their life on them. In this paper, we extend an FMI-based co-simulation framework for cyber-physical systems with the possibility of modelling semi-autonomous robots. Co-simulation can be used to gain more insights on the system under analysis at early stages of system development, and to highlight the impact of human interaction on safety. This approach is applied to the Line Follower Robot case study, available in the INTO-CPS project.