Teaching STAMP: High Level Communication Design Concerns for a Domestic Robot

This past semester, I taught Software Safety at the University of Houston Clear Lake using STAMP as the framework of understanding safety. The students were expected to address the safety design concerns of a research domestic robot our department is developing. This is a general software engineering degree, and as such, the students' knowledge of the domestic robot domain was virtually non-existent.In a nutshell, what follows are the lessons learned.
- After a general description and simple demo of a prototype robot, the students were told of an “accident” involving the domestic robot. The students were to interview the teacher and teaching assistant as eyewitnesses to the accident as accident investigators.
- After learning the details of the accident, the students performed a CAST analysis of the accident. Although rudimentary, the students delivered a mini-accident investigation presentation and report.
- Following the accident investigation, the students changed hats and became safety designers, using STPA as the tool to describe a high level design of the robot communication system.Presented here are their conclusions and commentary on the academic drill.