Multi-objective Optimal Control for Proactive Decision Making with Temporal Logic Models

The operation of today’s robots entails interactions with humans, in settings ranging from autonomous driving amidst human-driven vehicles to collaborative manufacturing. To effectively do so, robots must proactively decode the intent or plan of humans and concurrently leverage such a knowledge for safe, cooperative task satisfaction—a problem we refer to as proactive decision making. However, the problem of proactive intent decoding coupled with robotic control is computationally intractable as a robot must reason over several possible human behavioral models and resulting high-dimensional state trajectories. In this paper, we address the proactive decision making problem using a novel combination of algorithmic and data mining techniques. First, we distill high-dimensional state trajectories of human-robot interaction into concise, symbolic behavioral summaries that can be learned from data. Second, we leverage formal methods to model high-level agent goals, safe interaction, and information-seeking behavior with temporal logic formulae. Finally, we design a novel decision-making scheme that simply maintains a belief distribution over high-level, symbolic models of human behavior, and proactively plans informative control actions. Leveraging a rich dataset of real human driving data in crowded merging scenarios, we generate temporal logic models and use them to synthesize control strategies using tree-based value iteration and reinforcement learning (RL). Results from cooperative and adversarial simulated self-driving car scenarios demonstrate that our data-driven control strategies enable safe interaction, correct model identification, and significant dimensionality reduction