A Suite of Tools for Debugging Distributed Autonomous Systems

This paper describes a set of tools that allows a developer to instrument an autonomous control system to log data at run-time and then analyze that data to verify correct program behavior. Analysis is done using a new interval logic that allows system engineers to express complex, temporal specifications to be checked against the logged data of the autonomous control program. A feature of both the logging and analysis is that they can work with distributed programs. All data is synchronized into a common database. The data logging tools and the interval logic are fully implemented. Results are given from a NASA distributed autonomous control system application.