From 29 June to 2 July 2026, I had the chance to attend the RoboStar Summer School, hosted by the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Safe Autonomy at the University of York, UK. As a doctoral researcher in the AERIALIST project, where our whole mission is to make assistive health technology safer and more reliable, this felt like exactly the right place to be.
Ten years of software engineering for robots, packed into four days
RoboStar is a world leading centre of excellence for the software engineering of trustworthy robotic systems, and the Summer School managed to condense over a decade of that work into eight packed modules. Over four days, we went through the full lifecycle of building a robot you can actually trust: formal modelling, simulation, verification, testing and deployment, with ethical and legal considerations woven in throughout rather than tacked on at the end.
What stuck with me most was the focus on human in the loop assurance and adaptation. That’s exactly the kind of problem AERIALIST wrestles with every day: how do you ensure that a system is safe when it has to adapt to a specific user, a changing environment, and tasks that were never fully specified up front? RoboStar’s approach, rigorous and formal but still grounded in real deployment, gave me a genuinely useful new lens for thinking about assistive devices like powered wheelchairs, rehabilitation robots, and prostheses.
Why this matters for AERIALIST
AERIALIST exists to make new technology in assistive devices safer, so that home rehabilitation robots, electric wheelchairs, and powered prostheses can actually earn the trust of the people who need them. What the RoboStar Summer School reminded me is that a lot of the tools to get there already exist in the software engineering and formal methods community. Our research in AERIALIST is about bringing those tools into contact with the challenges specific to assistive technology.
I came back with a much clearer picture of how formal modelling and verification techniques can strengthen safety assurance, plus a great set of new contacts working on trustworthy autonomy across Europe.
Thanks to the RoboStar team for a superbly organised event, and to AERIALIST for supporting my attendance.
Mohammed Tloul, AERIALIST DC1 – KU Leuven