165 research outputs found
Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions
Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life,
requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly
amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing
the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been
proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of
formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding
the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by
experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the
behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are
usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are
difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission
specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for
instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission
specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification
problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships
to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in
temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and
CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The
patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted
from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441
real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these
reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing
human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and
two real robots
Robust Motion Planning employing Signal Temporal Logic
Motion planning classically concerns the problem of accomplishing a goal
configuration while avoiding obstacles. However, the need for more
sophisticated motion planning methodologies, taking temporal aspects into
account, has emerged. To address this issue, temporal logics have recently been
used to formulate such advanced specifications. This paper will consider Signal
Temporal Logic in combination with Model Predictive Control. A robustness
metric, called Discrete Average Space Robustness, is introduced and used to
maximize the satisfaction of specifications which results in a natural
robustness against noise. The comprised optimization problem is convex and
formulated as a Linear Program.Comment: 6 page
Synthesis of Distributed Longitudinal Control Protocols for a Platoon of Autonomous Vehicles
We develop a framework for control protocol synthesis for a platoon of autonomous vehicles subject to temporal logic specifications. We describe the desired behavior of the platoon in a set of linear temporal logic formulas, such as collision avoidance, close spacing or comfortability. The problem of decomposing a global specification for the platoon into distributed specification for each pair of adjacent vehicles is hard to solve. We use the invariant specifications to tackle this problem and the decomposition is proved to be scalable.. Based on the specifications in Assumption/Guarantee form, we can construct a two-player game (between the vehicle and its closest leader) locally to automatically synthesize a controller protocol for each vehicle. Simulation example for a distributed vehicles control problem is also shown
Control with Probabilistic Signal Temporal Logic
Autonomous agents often operate in uncertain environments where their
decisions are made based on beliefs over states of targets. We are interested
in controller synthesis for complex tasks defined over belief spaces. Designing
such controllers is challenging due to computational complexity and the lack of
expressivity of existing specification languages. In this paper, we propose a
probabilistic extension to signal temporal logic (STL) that expresses tasks
over continuous belief spaces. We present an efficient synthesis algorithm to
find a control input that maximises the probability of satisfying a given task.
We validate our algorithm through simulations of an unmanned aerial vehicle
deployed for surveillance and search missions.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to the 2016 American Control Conference (ACC 2016)
on September, 30, 2015 (under review
Learning Task Specifications from Demonstrations
Real world applications often naturally decompose into several sub-tasks. In
many settings (e.g., robotics) demonstrations provide a natural way to specify
the sub-tasks. However, most methods for learning from demonstrations either do
not provide guarantees that the artifacts learned for the sub-tasks can be
safely recombined or limit the types of composition available. Motivated by
this deficit, we consider the problem of inferring Boolean non-Markovian
rewards (also known as logical trace properties or specifications) from
demonstrations provided by an agent operating in an uncertain, stochastic
environment. Crucially, specifications admit well-defined composition rules
that are typically easy to interpret. In this paper, we formulate the
specification inference task as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) probability
inference problem, apply the principle of maximum entropy to derive an analytic
demonstration likelihood model and give an efficient approach to search for the
most likely specification in a large candidate pool of specifications. In our
experiments, we demonstrate how learning specifications can help avoid common
problems that often arise due to ad-hoc reward composition.Comment: NIPS 201
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