From AgentSpeak to C for Safety Considerations in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are becoming increasingly popular for both recreational and industrial applications, leading to growing concerns about safety. Autonomous systems, such as UAVs, are typically hybrid systems consisting of a low-level continuous control part and a high-level discrete decision making part. In this paper, we discuss using the agent programming language AgentSpeak to model the high-level decision making. We present a translation from AgentSpeak to C that bridges the gap between high-level decision making and low-level control code for safety-critical systems. This allows code to be written in a more natural high-level language, thereby reducing its overall complexity and making it easier to maintain, while still conforming to safety guidelines. As an exemplar, we present the code for a UAV autopilot. The generated code is evaluated on a simulator and a Parrot AR.Drone, demonstrating the flexibility and expressiveness of AgentSpeak as a modeling language for UAVs.