Article: Lahijanian, M; Maly, MR; Fried, D; Kavraki, LE; Kress-Gazit, H; Vardi, MY; (2016) “Iterative Temporal Planning in Uncertain Environments With Partial Satisfaction Guarantees”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 32 (3):583-599
Abstract: This paper introduces a motion-planning framework for a hybrid system with general continuous dynamics to satisfy a temporal logic specification consisting of cosafety and safety components in a partially unknown environment. The framework employs a multilayered synergistic planner to generate trajectories that satisfy the specification and adopt an iterative replanning strategy to deal with unknown obstacles. When the discovery of an obstacle renders the specification unsatisfiable, a division between the constraints in the specification is considered. The cosafety component of the specification is treated as a soft constraint, whose partial satisfaction is allowed, while the safety component is viewed as a hard constraint, whose violation is forbidden. To partially satisfy the cosafety component, inspirations are taken fromindoor-robotic scenarios, and three types of (unexpressed) restrictions on the ordering of subtasks in the specification are considered. For each type, a partial satisfaction method is introduced, which guarantees the generation of trajectories that do not violate the safety constraints while attending to partially satisfying the cosafety requirements with respect to the chosen restriction type. The efficacy of the framework is illustrated through case studies on a hybrid car-like robot in an office environment.
Funding Acknowledgement: National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions [1139011]; NSF NRI [1317849]; NSF CCF [1018798]; U.S. Army Research Laboratory; U.S. Army Research office [W911NF-09-1-0383]
Funding Text: This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions 1139011, NSF NRI 1317849, NSF CCF 1018798, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and by the U.S. Army Research office under Grant W911NF-09-1-0383. A subset of this paper was presented at the 16th International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2013.