Dynamics-Based Reactive Synthesis and Automated Revisions for High-Level Robot Control

The aim of this work is to address issues where formal specifications cannot be realized on a given dynamical system subjected to a changing environment. Such failures occur whenever the dynamics of the system restrict the robot in such a way that the environment may prevent the robot from progressing safely to its goals. We provide a framework that automatically synthesizes revisions to such specifications that restrict the assumed behaviors of the environment and the behaviors of the system. We provide a means for explaining such modifications to the user in a concise, easy-to-understand manner. Integral to the framework is a new algorithm for synthesizing controllers for reactive specifications that include a discrete representation of the robot's dynamics. The new approach is demonstrated with a complex task implemented using a unicycle model.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

BP-RRT: Barrier Pair Synthesis for Temporal Logic Motion Planning

For a nonlinear system (e.g. a robot) with its continuous state space trajectories constrained by a linear temporal logic specification, the synthesis of a low-level controller for mission execution often results in a non-convex optimization problem. We devise a new algorithm to solve this type of non-convex problems by formulating a rapidly-exploring random tree of barrier pairs, with each barrier pair composed of a quadratic barrier function and a full state feedback controller. The proposed method employs a rapid-exploring random tree to deal with the non-convex constraints and uses barrier pairs to fulfill the local convex constraints. As such, the method solves control problems fulfilling the required transitions of an automaton in order to satisfy given linear temporal logic constraints. At the same time it synthesizes locally optimal controllers in order to transition between the regions corresponding to the alphabet of the automaton. We demonstrate this new algorithm on a simulation of a two linkage manipulator robot.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) copyright 2020 IEE

Reachability-based Identification, Analysis, and Control Synthesis of Robot Systems

We introduce reachability analysis for the formal examination of robots. We propose a novel identification method, which preserves reachset conformance of linear systems. We additionally propose a simultaneous identification and control synthesis scheme to obtain optimal controllers with formal guarantees. In a case study, we examine the effectiveness of using reachability analysis to synthesize a state-feedback controller, a velocity observer, and an output feedback controller.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Scalable Synthesis and Verification: Towards Reliable Autonomy

We have seen the growing deployment of autonomous systems in our daily life, ranging from safety-critical self-driving cars to dialogue agents. While impactful and impressive, these systems do not often come with guarantees and are not rigorously evaluated for failure cases. This is in part due to the limited scalability of tools available for designing correct-by-construction systems, or verifying them posthoc. Another key limitation is the lack of availability of models for the complex environments with which autonomous systems often have to interact with. In the direction of overcoming these above mentioned bottlenecks to designing reliable autonomous systems, this thesis makes contributions along three fronts. First, we develop an approach for parallelized synthesis from linear-time temporal logic Specifications corresponding to the generalized reactivity (1) fragment. We begin by identifying a special case corresponding to singleton liveness goals that allows for a decomposition of the synthesis problem, which facilitates parallelized synthesis. Based on the intuition from this special case, we propose a more generalized approach for parallelized synthesis that relies on identifying equicontrollable states. Second, we consider learning-based approaches to enable verification at scale for complex systems, and for autonomous systems that interact with black-box environments. For the former, we propose a new abstraction refinement procedure based on machine learning to improve the performance of nonlinear constraint solving algorithms on large-scale problems. For the latter, we present a data-driven approach based on chance-constrained optimization that allows for a system to be evaluated for specification conformance without an accurate model of the environment. We demonstrate this approach on several tasks, including a lane-change scenario with real-world driving data. Lastly, we consider the problem of interpreting and verifying learning-based components such as neural networks. We introduce a new method based on Craig's interpolants for computing compact symbolic abstractions of pre-images for neural networks. Our approach relies on iteratively computing approximations that provably overapproximate and underapproximate the pre-images at all layers. Further, building on existing work for training neural networks for verifiability in the classification setting, we propose extensions that allow us to generalize the approach to more general architectures and temporal specifications.</p

Oracle-Guided Design and Analysis of Learning-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

We are in world where autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, surgical robots, robotic manipulators are becoming a reality. Such systems are considered \textit{safety-critical} since they interact with humans on a regular basis. Hence, before such systems can be integrated into our day to day life, we need to guarantee their safety. Recent success in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an increase in their use in real world robotic systems. For example, complex perception modules in self-driving cars and deep reinforcement learning controllers in robotic manipulators. Although powerful, they introduce an additional level of complexity when it comes to the formal analysis of autonomous systems. In this thesis, such systems are designated as Learning-Based Cyber-Physical Systems~(LB-CPS). In this thesis, we take inspiration from the Oracle-Guided Inductive Synthesis~(OGIS) paradigm to develop frameworks which can aid in achieving formal guarantees in different stages of an autonomous system design and analysis pipeline. Furthermore, we show that to guarantee the safety of LB-CPS, the design (synthesis) and analysis (verification) must consider feedback from the other. We consider five important parts of the design and analysis process and show a strong coupling among them, namely (i) Robust Control Synthesis from High Level Safety Specifications; (ii) Diagnosis and Repair of Safety Requirements for Control Synthesis; (iii) Counter-example Guided Data Augmentation for training high-accuracy ML models; (iv) Simulation-Guided Falsification and Verification against Adversarial Environments; and (v) Bridging Model and Real-World Gap. Finally, we introduce a software toolkit \verifai{} for the design and analysis of AI based systems, which was developed to provide a common formal platform to implement design and analysis frameworks for LB-CPS

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Beyond Probabilities

This position paper reflects on the state-of-the-art in decision-making under uncertainty. A classical assumption is that probabilities can sufficiently capture all uncertainty in a system. In this paper, the focus is on the uncertainty that goes beyond this classical interpretation, particularly by employing a clear distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. The paper features an overview of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and extensions to account for partial observability and adversarial behavior. These models sufficiently capture aleatoric uncertainty but fail to account for epistemic uncertainty robustly. Consequently, we present a thorough overview of so-called uncertainty models that exhibit uncertainty in a more robust interpretation. We show several solution techniques for both discrete and continuous models, ranging from formal verification, over control-based abstractions, to reinforcement learning. As an integral part of this paper, we list and discuss several key challenges that arise when dealing with rich types of uncertainty in a model-based fashion

Motion-Planning and Control of Autonomous Vehicles to Satisfy Linear Temporal Logic Specifications

Motion-planning is an essential component of autonomous aerial and terrestrial vehicles. The canonical Motion-planning problem, which is widely studied in the literature, is of planning point-to-point motion while avoiding obstacles. However, the desired degree of vehicular autonomy has steadily risen, and has consequently led to motion-planning problems where a vehicle is required to accomplish a high-level intelligent task, rather than simply move between two points. One way of specifying such intelligent tasks is via linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae. LTL is a formal logic system that includes temporal operators such as always, eventually, and until besides the usual logical operators. For autonomous vehicles, LTL formulae can concisely express tasks such as persistent surveillance, safety requirements, and temporal orders of visits to multiple locations. Recent control theoretic literature has discussed the generation of reference trajectories and/or the synthesis of feedback control laws to enable a vehicle to move in manners that satisfy LTL specifications. A crucial step in such synthesis is the generation of a so-called discrete abstraction of a vehicle kinematic/dynamic model. Typical techniques of generating a discrete abstraction require strong assumptions on controllability and/or linearity. This dissertation discusses fast motion-planning and control techniques to satisfy LTL specifications for vehicle models with nonholonomic kinematic constraints, which do not satisfy the aforesaid assumptions. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows. First, we present a new technique for constructing discrete abstractions of a Dubins vehicle model (namely, a vehicle that moves forward at a constant speed with a minimum turning radius). This technique relies on the so-called method of lifted graphs and precomputed reachable set calculations. Using this technique, we provide an algorithm to generate vehicle reference trajectories satisfying LTL specifications without requiring complete controllability in the presence of workspace constraints, and without requiring linearity or linearization of the vehicle model. Second, we present a technique for centralized motion-planning for a team of vehicles to collaboratively satisfy a common LTL specification. This technique is also based on the method of lifted graphs. Third, we present an incremental version of the proposed motion-planning techniques, which has an “anytime property. This property means that a feasible solution is computed quickly, and the iterative updates are made to this solution with a guarantee of convergence to an optimal solution. This version is suited for real-time implementation, where a hard bound on the computation time is imposed. Finally, we present a randomized sampling-based technique for generating reference trajectories that satisfy given LTL specifications. This technique is an alternative to the aforesaid technique based on lifted graphs. We illustrate the proposed techniques using numerical simulation examples. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed techniques in comparison to the existing literature in terms of computational time and memory requirements

Artificial Intelligence Research Branch future plans

This report contains information on the activities of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (FIA) at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in 1992, as well as planned work in 1993. These activities span a range from basic scientific research through engineering development to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out in FIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. All of our work has research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. FIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AI applications groups throughout all NASA centers. This report is organized along three major research themes: (1) Planning and Scheduling: deciding on a sequence of actions to achieve a set of complex goals and determining when to execute those actions and how to allocate resources to carry them out; (2) Machine Learning: techniques for forming theories about natural and man-made phenomena; and for improving the problem-solving performance of computational systems over time; and (3) Research on the acquisition, representation, and utilization of knowledge in support of diagnosis design of engineered systems and analysis of actual systems