Automaton-Guided Controller Synthesis for Nonlinear Systems with Temporal Logic

Eric M. Wolff, Ufuk Topcu, and Richard M. Murray
To appear, 2013 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

We develop a method for the control of discrete-time nonlinear systems subject to temporal logic specifications. Our approach uses a coarse abstraction of the system and an automaton representing the temporal logic specification to guide the search for a feasible trajectory. This decomposes the search for a feasible trajectory into a series of constrained reachability problems. Thus, one can create controllers for any system for which techniques exist to compute (approximate) solutions to constrained reachability problems. Representative techniques include sampling-based methods for motion planning, reachable set computations for linear systems, and graph search for finite discrete systems. Our approach avoids the expensive computation of a discrete abstraction, and its implementation is amenable to parallel computing. We demonstrate our approach with numerical experiments on temporal logic motion planning problems with high-dimensional (10+ states) continuous systems.

• Conference Paper: http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/preprints/wtm13-iros.pdf
• Project(s): Boeing