AbSynth 2015 is a two-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the
2015 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference in Rome, Italy on July 16-17, 2015.
The increasing use of automation in safety- and mission-critical situations encourages the development of
theories and techniques that can provide formal guarantees on the performance of the system. Model-Driven
Software Engineering (MDSE) and Formal Methods (FM) are closely related in that that they both seek
abstractions that preserve the important properties of the underlying concrete system, as well as provide
rigorous methods for system design to ensure desirable behavior with respect to complex specifications.
However, much like the divergence of classical AI and Robotics into separate fields concerned with high-level and low-level details of the same systems (i.e. robots), FM and MDSE have diverged. MDSE research in robotics is aligned with the primary goal of creating quality low-level software for robotic systems, while formal methods apply chiefly to the design and validation of systems at a high-level of abstraction. It is clear, however, that the two are complimentary, and that a reunification is overdue. Quality, reliable software for robotic systems created using MDSE will facilitate the abstraction and modeling of robotic systems, which further promotes the adoption of FM in constructing robotic systems with a high degree of autonomy.