Route Guidance for Satisfying Temporal Logic Specifications on Aircraft Motion

We present a new technique for aircraft route guidance subject to linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. The proposed approach is based on workspace partitioning, and relies on the idea of so-called lifted graphs. Briefly, edges in a lifted graph are successions of adjacent edges in the topological graph associated with the workspace partition. We associate edges of the lifted graph with certain reachability properties of the aircraft model. The main result of this paper is the precise characterization of acceptable routes (namely, sequences of cells) that are guaranteed to be traversable by admissible state trajectories of the aircraft model while satisfying the given LTL specifications. The proposed approach incorporates nonholonomic kinematic constraints, does not require complete controllability in the presence of workspace constraints, and does not require linearization of the aircraft model. We discuss numerical methods to implement the proposed route-planning algorithm. We illustrate the proposed algorithm with numerical simulation examples that reflect the practical significance of LTL specifications in aircraft guidance. ∗Assistant Professor, Aerospace Engineering Program. AIAA Member. †Graduate Research Assistant, Aerospace Engineering Program.