Autonomy requirements engineering

Contemporary robotics relies on the most recent advances in automation and robotic technologies to promote autonomy and autonomic computing principles to robotized systems. However, it appears that the design and implementation of autonomous systems is an extremely challenging task. The problem is stemming from the very nature of such systems where features like environment monitoring and self-monitoring allow for awareness capabilities driving the system behavior. Moreover, changes in the operational environment may trigger self-adaptation. The first and one of the biggest challenges in the design and implementation of such systems is how to handle requirements specifically related to the autonomy of a system. Requirements engineering for autonomous systems appears to be a wide open research area with only a limited number of approaches yet considered. In this paper, we present an approach to Autonomy Requirements Engineering where goals models are merged with special generic autonomy requirements. The approach helps us identify and record the autonomy requirements of a system in the form of special self-* objectives and other assistive requirements, those capturing alternative objectives the system may pursue in the presence of factors threatening the achievement of the initial system goals. The paper presents a case study where autonomy requirements engineering is applied to the domain of space missions.