Aerialist Haslerstiftung Project

The goal of the AERIALIST project is to enable simulation-based testing and test automation for UAVs, particularly by addressing the reality gap in testing UAV software. To achieve this ambitious goal, the project first investigates systematic solutions for the runtime monitoring of UAV behavior, enabling early triggering of self-healing procedures in case of misbehaviors. Furthermore, it focuses on approaches reducing the simulation-based testing cost, by predicting test outcomes without running simulations, and by extracting less expensive lower-level tests from simulated tests.

The project has been funded by the Hasler Foundation.

news

Nov 01, 2024	The call for the Second edition of the UAV Testing Competition is open now.

selected publications

ICST

Simulation-based test case generation for unmanned aerial vehicles in the neighborhood of real flights

Sajad Khatiri, Sebastiano Panichella, and Paolo Tonella

In 2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{khatiri2023simulation,
  title = {Simulation-based test case generation for unmanned aerial vehicles in the neighborhood of real flights},
  author = {Khatiri, Sajad and Panichella, Sebastiano and Tonella, Paolo},
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)},
  pages = {281--292},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE}
}

ICSE

Simulation-based testing of unmanned aerial vehicles with Aerialist

Sajad Khatiri, Sebastiano Panichella, and Paolo Tonella

In Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings, 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{khatiri2024simulation,
  title = {Simulation-based testing of unmanned aerial vehicles with Aerialist},
  author = {Khatiri, Sajad and Panichella, Sebastiano and Tonella, Paolo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings},
  pages = {134--138},
  year = {2024}
}

SBFT

SBFT tool competition 2024-cps-uav test case generation track

Sajad Khatiri, Prasun Saurabh, Timothy Zimmermann, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing, 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{khatiri2024sbft,
  title = {SBFT tool competition 2024-cps-uav test case generation track},
  author = {Khatiri, Sajad and Saurabh, Prasun and Zimmermann, Timothy and Munasinghe, Charith and Birchler, Christian and Panichella, Sebastiano},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing},
  pages = {29--32},
  year = {2024}
}

When Uncertainty Leads to Unsafety: Empirical Insights into the Role of Uncertainty in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Safety

Sajad Khatiri, Fatemeh Mohammadi Amin, Sebastiano Panichella, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08908, 2025

Bib

@article{khatiri2025uncertainty,
  title = {When Uncertainty Leads to Unsafety: Empirical Insights into the Role of Uncertainty in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Safety},
  author = {Khatiri, Sajad and Amin, Fatemeh Mohammadi and Panichella, Sebastiano and Tonella, Paolo},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08908},
  year = {2025}
}