No Arabic abstract
Urban Air Mobility (UAM), or the scenario where multiple manned and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) carry out various tasks over urban airspaces, is a transportation concept of the future that is gaining prominence. UAM missions with complex spatial, temporal and reactive requirements can be succinctly represented using Signal Temporal Logic (STL), a behavioral specification language. However, planning and control of systems with STL specifications is computationally intensive, usually resulting in planning approaches that do not guarantee dynamical feasibility, or control approaches that cannot handle complex STL specifications. Here, we present an approach to co-design the planner and control such that a given STL specification (possibly over multiple UAVs) is satisfied with trajectories that are dynamically feasible and our controller can track them with a bounded tracking-error that the planner accounts for. The tracking controller is formulated for the non-linear dynamics of the individual UAVs, and the tracking error bound is computed for this controller when the trajectories satisfy some kinematic constraints. We also augment an existing multi-UAV STL-based trajectory generator in order to generate trajectories that satisfy such constraints. We show that this co-design allows for trajectories that satisfy a given STL specification, and are also dynamically feasible in the sense that they can be tracked with bounded error. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated through simulations of multi-UAV missions.
This paper studies the robust satisfiability check and online control synthesis problems for uncertain discrete-time systems subject to signal temporal logic (STL) specifications. Different from existing techniques, this work proposes an approach based on STL, reachability analysis, and temporal logic trees. Firstly, a real-time version of STL semantics and a tube-based temporal logic tree are proposed. We show that such a tree can be constructed from every STL formula. Secondly, using the tube-based temporal logic tree, a sufficient condition is obtained for the robust satisfiability check of the uncertain system. When the underlying system is deterministic, a necessary and sufficient condition for satisfiability is obtained. Thirdly, an online control synthesis algorithm is designed. It is shown that when the STL formula is robustly satisfiable and the initial state of the system belongs to the initial root node of the tube-based temporal logic tree, it is guaranteed that the trajectory generated by the controller satisfies the STL formula. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by an automated car overtaking example.
We propose a mathematical framework for synthesizing motion plans for multi-agent systems that fulfill complex, high-level and formal local specifications in the presence of inter-agent communication. The proposed synthesis framework consists of desired motion specifications in temporal logic (STL) formulas and a local motion controller that ensures the underlying agent not only to accomplish the local specifications but also to avoid collisions with other agents or possible obstacles, while maintaining an optimized communication quality of service (QoS) among the agents. Utilizing a Gaussian fading model for wireless communication channels, the framework synthesizes the desired motion controller by solving a joint optimization problem on motion planning and wireless communication, in which both the STL specifications and the wireless communication conditions are encoded as mixed integer-linear constraints on the variables of the agents dynamical states and communication channel status. The overall framework is demonstrated by a case study of communication-aware multi-robot motion planning and the effectiveness of the framework is validated by simulation results.
The deployment of autonomous systems in uncertain and dynamic environments has raised fundamental questions. Addressing these is pivotal to build fully autonomous systems and requires a systematic integration of planning and control. We first propose reactive risk signal interval temporal logic (ReRiSITL) as an extension of signal temporal logic (STL) to formulate complex spatiotemporal specifications. Unlike STL, ReRiSITL allows to consider uncontrollable propositions that may model humans as well as random environmental events such as sensor failures. Additionally, ReRiSITL allows to incorporate risk measures, such as (but not limited to) the Conditional Value-at-Risk, to measure the risk of violating certain spatial specifications. Second, we propose an algorithm to check if an ReRiSITL specification is satisfiable. For this purpose, we abstract the ReRiSITL specification into a timed signal transducer and devise a game-based approach. Third, we propose a reactive planning and control framework for dynamical control systems under ReRiSITL specifications.
Motivated by the recent interest in cyber-physical and autonomous robotic systems, we study the problem of dynamically coupled multi-agent systems under a set of signal temporal logic tasks. In particular, the satisfaction of each of these signal temporal logic tasks depends on the behavior of a distinct set of agents. Instead of abstracting the agent dynamics and the temporal logic tasks into a discrete domain and solving the problem therein or using optimization-based methods, we derive collaborative feedback control laws. These control laws are based on a decentralized control barrier function condition that results in discontinuous control laws, as opposed to a centralized condition resembling the single-agent case. The benefits of our approach are inherent robustness properties typically present in feedback control as well as satisfaction guarantees for continuous-time multi-agent systems. More specifically, time-varying control barrier functions are used that account for the semantics of the signal temporal logic tasks at hand. For a certain fragment of signal temporal logic tasks, we further propose a systematic way to construct such control barrier functions. Finally, we show the efficacy and robustness of our framework in an experiment including a group of three omnidirectional robots.
We propose a framework based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to determine an optimal control strategy for a discrete-time system that is required to satisfy specifications given as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulae. RNNs can store information of a system over time, thus, enable us to determine satisfaction of the dynamic temporal requirements specified in STL formulae. Given a STL formula, a dataset of satisfying system executions and corresponding control policies, we can use RNNs to predict a control policy at each time based on the current and previous states of system. We use Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to guarantee the safety of the predicted control policy. We validate our theoretical formulation and demonstrate its performance in an optimal control problem subject to partially unknown safety constraints through simulations.