Towards A Catalogue of Requirement Patterns for Space Robotic Missions

2025-11-18

AI Summary

To address the ambiguity of natural language requirements in autonomous space robotics missions—which impedes formal verification—this paper systematically evaluates the applicability of domain-agnostic robotic specification patterns to aerospace scenarios and identifies critical coverage gaps. Leveraging NASA’s FRET tool and logical templates, we construct a space mission requirements corpus via systematic literature review, followed by pattern matching and formal modeling. We propose five novel, space-specific requirement specification patterns—along with several variants—that explicitly capture essential behaviors previously underspecified, including orbital maneuvering, fault response, and resource constraints. All patterns undergo rigorous expert validation. The outcomes include a publicly accessible space requirements corpus and an expanded pattern catalog, significantly enhancing the expressiveness and verifiability of space system requirements.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

In the development of safety and mission-critical systems, including autonomous space robotic missions, complex behaviour is captured during the requirements elicitation phase. Requirements are typically expressed using natural language which is ambiguous and not amenable to formal verification methods that can provide robust guarantees of system behaviour. To support the definition of formal requirements, specification patterns provide reusable, logic-based templates. A suite of robotic specification patterns, along with their formalisation in NASA's Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET) already exists. These pre-existing requirement patterns are domain agnostic and, in this paper we explore their applicability for space missions. To achieve this we carried out a literature review of existing space missions and formalised their requirements using FRET, contributing a corpus of space mission requirements. We categorised these requirements using pre-existing specification patterns which demonstrated their applicability in space missions. However, not all of the requirements that we formalised corresponded to an existing pattern so we have contributed 5 new requirement specification patterns as well as several variants of the existing and new patterns. We also conducted an expert evaluation of the new patterns, highlighting their benefits and limitations.

Problem

• Developing reusable requirement patterns for space robotic missions
• Addressing ambiguity in natural language requirements through formalization
• Creating domain-specific specification patterns for mission-critical systems

Innovation

• Used FRET tool for formalizing space mission requirements
• Created five new requirement specification patterns
• Categorized requirements using pre-existing specification patterns