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arXiv · 2505.20969

SCALOFT: An Initial Approach for Situation Coverage-Based Safety Analysis of an Autonomous Aerial Drone in a Mine Environment

Nawshin Mannan Proma·Victoria J Hodge·Rob Alexander
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Abstract

The safety of autonomous systems in dynamic and hazardous environments poses significant challenges. This paper presents a testing approach named SCALOFT for systematically assessing the safety of an autonomous aerial drone in a mine. SCALOFT provides a framework for developing diverse test cases, real-time monitoring of system behaviour, and detection of safety violations. Detected violations are then logged with unique identifiers for detailed analysis and future improvement. SCALOFT helps build a safety argument by monitoring situation coverage and calculating a final coverage measure. We have evaluated the performance of this approach by deliberately introducing seeded faults into the system and assessing whether SCALOFT is able to detect those faults. For a small set of plausible faults, we show that SCALOFT is successful in this.

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Nawshin Mannan Proma, Victoria J Hodge, Rob Alexander. 2025-05-27. SCALOFT: An Initial Approach for Situation Coverage-Based Safety Analysis of an Autonomous Aerial Drone in a Mine Environment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20969

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