Towards Deductive Verification of Control Algorithms for Autonomous Marine Vehicles

The use of autonomous vehicles in real-world applications is often precluded by the difficulty of providing safety guarantees for their complex controllers. The simulation based testing of these controllers cannot deliver sufficient safety guarantees, and the use of formal verification is very challenging due to the hybrid nature of the autonomous vehicles. Our workin-progress paper introduces a formal verification approach that addresses this challenge by integrating the numerical computation of such a system (in GNU/Octave) with its hybrid system verification by means of a proof assistant (Isabelle). To show the effectiveness of our approach, we use it to verify differential invariants of an Autonomous Marine Vehicle with a controller switching between multiple modes.