Autonomy software verification and validation might not be as hard as it seems

The verification and validation of autonomy software is widely believed to be a challenging unsolved problem. To a certain extent this is true, but in this paper I argue that the problem is not nearly as severe as seems to be widely perceived. Many of the perceived hard problems in autonomy software V&V also exist for traditional software, and can be solved using many of the same methods and techniques used for traditional spacecraft software. In particular, the problem of intractably large state spaces exists for any nontrivial software system. This problem can be addressed for autonomy software in the same way that it has been addressed for traditional software: by decomposing the large state space into a tractable number of equivalence classes that exhibit qualitatively identical behavior, each one containing a large number of states.