Designing Reactive Robot Controllers with LTLMoP

This paper shows an example application of the LTLMoP mission planning toolkit, in which an Aldebaran Nao and an iRobot Create each play a very basic game of hide-and-seek. Introduction Most robots currently available to the consumer, medical, and industrial markets are single-purpose, pre-programmed devices. However, as hardware technology matures, we will see more and more general-purpose robots become commonplace. This development, however, will require an accompanying advance in human interfaces, so that end-users can have the robots perform desired tasks on the fly, without needing specialized technical knowledge or being limited to a repertoire of pre-specified behaviors. The Linear Temporal Logic MissiOn Planning (LTLMoP) toolkit1 presents one possible solution to this problem, avoiding the tedious and error-prone process of manual controller design by automatically synthesizing controllers from task specifications written by a user in structured English. In other words, it is only necessary for users to input what they want the robot to do, not how the robot should specifically accomplish it. In this paper, we show an example application of the toolkit in which we have an Aldebaran Nao2 and an iRobot Create3 each play a very basic game of hide-and-seek with a person. Technical Approach In LTLMoP, a task specification consists of behavioral requirements for the robot (i.e. goals and constraints) as well as any assumptions that can be made about the behavior of the environment. The structured English specification is transformed into a formula in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), specified over binary propositions that correspond to abstracted sensor states (e.g. “see player”), atomic ∗This work is supported by ARO MURI (SUBTLE) W911NF07-1-0216. Copyright c © 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Available from http://ltlmop.github.com http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/ http://www.irobot.com Gym Classroom2 Office Classroom1 Closet