Extended LTLvis motion planning interface

Abstract

Robots are becoming an important part of our life and industry. Although a lot of robot control interfaces have been developed to simplify the control method and improve user experience, users still cannot control robots comfortably. With the improvements of the robot functions, the requirements of universality and ease of use of robot control interfaces are also increasing. This research introduces a graphical interface for Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specifications for mobile robots. It is a sketch based interface built on the Android platform which makes the LTL control interface more friendly to nonexpert users. By predefining a set of areas of interest, this interface can quickly and efficiently create plans that satisfy extended plan goals in LTL. The interface can also allow users to customize the paths for this plan by sketching a set of reference trajectories. Given the custom paths by the user, the LTL specification and the environment, the interface generates a plan balancing the customized paths and the LTL specifications. We also show experimental results with the implemented interface.ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions

“…We automatically extracted 428 mission requirements from the Spectra file. The number of mission requirements (MR) per robotic application is reported in Table V. In the case of LTLMoP, 8 requirements were extracted from the corresponding research papers [39], [42] (Table V MP column).…”

“…Unfortunately, defining temporal logic formulae is complicated. As such, the definition of mission specifications is laborious and error-prone, as widely recognized in the softwareengineering and robotics communities (e.g., [9], [40]- [42]).…”

“…Conceptually, defining a robotic mission entails two problems. First, ambiguities in mission requirements that prevent precise and unambiguous specifications must be resolved [38], [42], [43]. Consider the very simple mission requirement "the robot shall visit the kitchen and the office."…”

“…This highlights the ambiguity in natural language requirements formulation, and common mistakes may be introduced when diverse interpretations are given [37], [44]- [46]. Second, creating specifications that correctly capture requirements is hard and error prone [9], [40]- [42]. Assume that the correct intended behavior requires that "the kitchen and the office are visited in order," which is a common mission specification problem [47], [48].…”

“…We evaluated the benefits obtained by the usage of our pattern support in rigorous and systematic mission design. We collected 441 mission requirements in natural language: 436 obtained from robotic development environments used by practitioners (i.e., Spectra [63] and LTLMoP [39], [42]), and five defined in collaboration with two well-known robotics companies developing commercial, human-size service robots (BOSCH and PAL Robotics). We show that most of the mission requirements were ambiguous, expressible using the proposed patterns, and that the usage of the patterns reduces ambiguities.…”