This Time the Robot Settles for a Cost: A Quantitative Approach to Temporal Logic Planning with Partial Satisfaction

M. Lahijanian, S. Almagor, D. Fried, L. E. Kavraki, and M. Y. Vardi, “This Time the Robot Settles for a Cost: A Quantitative Approach to Temporal Logic Planning with Partial Satisfaction,” in Proceedings of The Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference (AAAI-15), Austin, TX, 2015, pp. 3664–3671.

Abstract

The specification of complex motion goals through temporal logics is increasingly favored in robotics to narrow the gap between task and motion planning. A major limiting factor of such logics, however, is their Boolean satisfaction condition. To relax this limitation, we introduce a method for quantifying the satisfaction of co-safe linear temporal logic specifications, and propose a planner that uses this method to synthesize robot trajectories with the optimal satisfaction value. The method assigns costs to violations of specifications from user-defined proposition costs. These violation costs define a distance to satisfaction and can be computed algorithmically using a weighted automaton. The planner utilizes this automaton and an abstraction of the robotic system to construct a product graph that captures all possible robot trajectories and their distances to satisfaction. Then, a plan with the minimum distance to satisfaction is generated by employing this graph as the high-level planner in a synergistic planning framework. The efficacy of the method is illustrated on a robot with unsatisfiable specifications in an office environment.

Publisher: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI15/paper/view/10001

PDF preprint: http://kavrakilab.org/publications/lahijanian-almagor2015this-time-robot.pdf