Sampling-based synthesis of maximally-satisfying controllers for temporal logic specifications

Cristian-Ioan Vasile, Vasumathi Raman, and Sertac Karaman. Sampling-based synthesis of maximally-satisfying controllers for temporal logic specifications. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pages 3840-3847, Vancouver, BC, Canada, September 2017. doi:10.1109/IROS.2017.8206235.

Published date: 
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Type: 
Abstract

Sampling-based methods have advanced the state of the art in robotic motion planning and control across complex, high-dimensional domains. With few exceptions, such approaches only admit simple constraints and objectives, such as collision-avoidance and reaching a goal state. In this work we leverage the best of two worlds: the scalability of sampling-based motion planning and the precise formal guarantees of temporal logic. We present an incremental sampling-based algorithm that synthesizes a motion control policy satisfying a bounded Signal Temporal Logic formula over properties of a given environment. Our key insight is that we can bias the selection of samples using a quantitative measure of how well the best path in the current tree of samples satisfies the specification. This allows us both to converge to a path that satisfies the specification, and to improve upon an existing path, i.e. to satisfy the specification with maximum robustness. We illustrate the performance of our method in several case studies.