Vasumathi Raman, 11 February 2013

Monday, February 11th

• 9:30 am: Richard, 109 Steele Lab
• 10:00 am: Anissa (reimbursement)
• 10:15 am: Necmiye, 130 Steele Lab
• 11 am: Seminar, 114 Steele Lab
• 12 pm: Lunch (Chandler)
• 1 pm: NCS group meeting
• 3:00 pm: Mumu
• 3:45 pm: Scott Livingston; meet in Steele library.
• 4:30 pm: Eric Wolff, 114 Steele Lab (library)
• 5:15 pm: Richard, 109 Steele Lab
• 5:45 pm: done for the day

Seminar

Localizing Causes of Unsynthesizability for High-Level Robot Behaviours

A key challenge in robotics is the generation of reactive controllers for autonomous, high-level robot behaviors. Recently, Linear Temporal Logic synthesis has emerged as a powerful tool for automatically generating autonomous robot hybrid controllers that guarantee desired behaviors expressed by the GR(1) class of temporal logic specifications. However, there are still several challenges to be met when using synthesis for robot control. When there does not exist a controller that fulfills a given specification, standard approaches do not provide the user with a source of failure, making the troubleshooting of specifications an unstructured and time-consuming process. This talk will present results on automating the analysis of unsynthesizable specifications in order to identify minimal sources of failure. The talk will also discuss unsynthesizability arising from continuous execution of discrete controllers in a physical domain, and the challenges observed when creating correct-by-construction controllers for robots with actions of arbitrary relative execution durations.

Bio: Vasu Raman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, NY. Her research addresses several challenges in correct-by-construction synthesis for robot control, including analyzing specifications that are impossible from a synthesis standpoint, and bridging the gap between provably correct discrete solutions and their continuous implementations. She is advised by Hadas Kress-Gazit in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and affiliated with the Autonomous Systems Lab and the LTLMoP Project. Her broader research interests include game theory, cryptography and reasoning about knowledge, and she previously worked with Joe Halpern and Rafael Pass on logical characterizations of cryptography and computational game theory. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics from Wellesley College, MA.