How to avoid runtime errors on drones using SPARK (2015)
This is good writeup but very misleading title. Article essentially describes using SPARK to avoid runtime errors in firmware such as overflows. But that is far cry from avoiding drone crashes. You can do lot of these things with sophisticated code analysis (although not all of it). But the thing is that it doesn&#x27;t solve the primary issues of <i>algorithmic</i> errors or even errors that might occur because of things like timing issues or sensor noise. Of course, it doesn&#x27;t do anything about obstacle detection and avoidance. I would imagine that very small number of crashes occurs due to runtime errors in firmware.<p>There have been lot of other work going on for verifiability for realtime firmware code. For example P programming language: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;p-org&#x2F;P" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;p-org&#x2F;P</a>. But still it doesn&#x27;t tackle the issues mentioned above that causes majority of crashes.