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Automated generation of dynamics-based runtime certificates for high-level control

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Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of synthesizing controllers for reactive missions carried out by dynamical systems operating in environments of known physical geometry but consisting of uncontrolled elements that the system must react to at execution time. Such problems have value in semi-structured industrial automation settings, especially those in which robots must behave collaboratively yet safely with their human counterparts. The proposed synthesis framework addresses cases where there exists no satisfying controller for the mission, given the dynamical system and the environment’s assumed behaviors. We introduce an approach that leverages information about an abstraction of the dynamical system to automatically generate a concise set of revisions to such specifications. We provide a graphical visualization tool as a design aid, allowing the revisions to be conveyed to the user interactively and added to the specification at the user’s discretion. Any accepted statements become certificates that, if satisfied at runtime, provide guarantees for the current mission on the given dynamics. Our approach is cast into a general framework that works with various discrete representations (i.e. abstractions) of the system dynamics. We present case studies that illustrate application of our approach to controller synthesis for two example robotic missions employing different abstractions of the system.

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Notes

  1. We only make the action explicit (W in this case), since mutual exclusion disallows the other actions from being activated at the same time.

  2. https://github.com/VerifiableRobotics/LTLMoP/

  3. https://sites.google.com/a/cyphylab.ee.ucla.edu/pessoa/

  4. https://github.com/VerifiableRobotics/slugs.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Paulo Tabuada for insightful discussions and assistance with PESSOA, Vasumathi Raman and Salar Moarref for insightful discussions relating to synthesis of counterstrategy-based environment revisions, and Divyansha Sehgal for her assistance with the visualization tool. The authors lastly thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive critique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Jonathan DeCastro & Hadas Kress-Gazit

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Rüdiger Ehlers

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Technical University of Munich, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Matthias Rungger

  4. Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Ayça Balkan

Authors
  1. Jonathan DeCastro
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  2. Rüdiger Ehlers
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  3. Matthias Rungger
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  4. Ayça Balkan
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  5. Hadas Kress-Gazit
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jonathan DeCastro.

Additional information

This work was supported by the NSF Expeditions in Computing project ExCAPE: Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering [grant number CCF-1138996]

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DeCastro, J., Ehlers, R., Rungger, M. et al. Automated generation of dynamics-based runtime certificates for high-level control. Discrete Event Dyn Syst 27, 371–405 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10626-016-0232-7

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