Secure and safe multi-robot systems
European strategy and research roadmap documents emphasise the significant societal and economic benefits coming from robotic and autonomous systems. Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) comprise distributed and interconnected robotic teams that can carry out tasks beyond the competency of a single robot. Although MRS offer improved scalability and performance, increased robustness, and mission enablement, the lack of a systematic engineering methodology, covering the complete engineering lifecycle and handling efficiently the salient characteristics of MRS such as openness, uncertainty, variability, and interplay of safety and security, results in solutions that fail because of fragile design and unrealistic assumptions. SESAME addresses these problems through an open, modular, model-based approach for the systematic engineering of dependable MRS. SESAME is underpinned by public meta-models, components and configuration tools supporting the dependable MRS operation in uncertain settings characterised by emergent behaviours and possible cyber-attacks. To demonstrate this timely and ambitious goal, SESAME combines five end- user-led use-cases (in the domains of healthcare, agile manufacturing, agri-food, and inspection and maintenance) with R&D competences of partners that have a long track-record in conducting cutting-edge research on robotics, model- based safety, security analysis, validation, and verification, towards the actual delivery of research results characterised by widely-used, sustainable and industrial-strength open-source software. An advisory board of world-class experts guides the development of SESAME .