The Chicken Can Cross The Road

This paper is motivated by the age-old question: why did the chicken cross the road? In this paper we discuss the challenges of developing and modelling a cyber-physical system to help a chicken (a robot or rover) safely pass through a field (road) of moving obstacles (cars) to reach a predetermined goal (the other side of the road). In this project, we construct hybrid dL programs that capture simplified versions of this problem. We then prove the corresponding safety condition that the chicken will not collide with any cars regardless of whatever choices it may make, and we also prove that in certain, realistic situations, the chicken will always have a way of crossing the road without getting hit by any cars. Parts of the proofs are automated by a theorem prover called Keymaera, while the rest is proved with traditional manual sequent proofs.