Temporal-Logic-Based Reactive Mission and Motion Planning

This paper provides a framework to automatically generate a hybrid controller that guarantees that the robot can achieve its task when a robot model, a class of admissible environments, and a high-level task or behavior for the robot are provided. The desired task specifications, which are expressed in a fragment of linear temporal logic (LTL), can capture complex robot behaviors such as search and rescue, coverage, and collision avoidance. In addition, our framework explicitly captures sensor specifications that depend on the environment with which the robot is interacting, which results in a novel paradigm for sensor-based temporal-logic-motion planning. As one robot is part of the environment of another robot, our sensor-based framework very naturally captures multirobot specifications in a decentralized manner. Our computational approach is based on first creating discrete controllers satisfying specific LTL formulas. If feasible, the discrete controller is then used to guide the sensor-based composition of continuous controllers, which results in a hybrid controller satisfying the high-level specification but only if the environment is admissible.