Controlling Golog Programs against MTL Constraints
This work addresses the tediousness of managing low-level details in robotic systems for users, though it appears incremental as it extends existing Golog and timed automata approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating high-level robot control with low-level hardware operations by modeling implicit temporal constraints as MTL formulas, resulting in a method to synthesize controllers that concurrently execute both levels to satisfy these specifications.
While Golog is an expressive programming language to control the high-level behavior of a robot, it is often tedious to use on a real robotic system. On an actual robot, the user needs to consider low-level details, such as enabling and disabling hardware components, e.g., a camera to detect objects for grasping. In other words, high-level actions usually pose implicit temporal constraints on the low-level platform, which are typically independent of the concrete program to be executed. In this paper, we propose to make these constraints explicit by modeling them as MTL formulas, which enforce the execution of certain low-level platform operations in addition to the main program. Based on results from timed automata controller synthesis, we describe a method to synthesize a controller that executes both the high-level program and the low-level platform operations concurrently in order to satisfy the MTL specification. This allows the user to focus on the high-level behavior without the need to consider low-level operations. We present an extension to Golog by clocks together with the required theoretical foundations as well as decidability results.