In a world ever more populated with robots, their communication with humans is crucial to ensure an intuitive and efficient interaction. By using sight, touch or hearing, information exchanges occur between robots and the environment. The goal of this project is to develop an independent system that transmits unidirectional messages from a robot to humans through visual communication. The robot must be autonomous, mobile, and is intended to work in industrial noisy environments or environments where tasks that can be harmful to humans need to be carried out. The system will utilise robot operation data by accessing the associated ROS 2 framework to control an LED array that transmits information to third parties surrounding the robot. A Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is conceived from scratch to run Micro-ROS and control a WS2813 LED array. The board is designed, assembled, and validated, with programming done using Arduino development tools. The Micro-ROS Arduino tool is used to communicate with ROS 2 and the FastLED library to control the lighting array. Many distinct lighting modes have been developed to represent different robot states by using different combinations of colours patterns. The system can read instructions available in a ROS 2 framework, associated to the robot state, and accurately control the LED array to display the intended visual message.This work is done as part of a project by Active Space Technologies involving a multi-purpose autonomous robot. Its main function is hospital disinfection, aimed at freeing healthcare workers from a gruelling and dangerous task.

This work discusses the ongoing development of a toolset named MARS aimed to ease the process of safely deploying runtime verification monitors into distributed micro-ROS and ROS2 nodes. The work is motivated by a use case in the health and automotive domains and covers safety/security concerns around the manipulation of sensitive biometric data.

Advancements in the energy efficiency and computational power of embedded devices allow developers to equip resource-constrained systems with a greater number of features and more complex behavior. As complexity of a system grows, so does the difficulty in demonstrating its overall correctness. Formal methods have been successfully applied in a variety of verification and validation scenarios, but their wide adoption in the industry and academia is still lackluster. Among the explanations listed in the literature for the low adoption of these techniques are the perceived difficulty of getting into formal practices and how formal tools are not usually aimed at practical use cases. Striving to address these issues, we present MARS, an open-source domain-specific language for the safe instrumentation of runtime verification monitors into real-time resource-constrained distributed systems. Our main objective with MARS is to ease the integration of runtime verification monitors in distributed applications while also providing developers with evidence of their correct instrumentation in the context of systems where dependability and temporal requirements need to be respected even under extreme resource constraints. We present the language syntax, the set of tools embedded into its compiler, its functionalities, and a use case to exemplify its use in a practical distributed application.