PuRSUE -from specification of robotic environments to synthesis of controllers

Journal article, 2020

Developing robotic applications is a complex task, which requires skills that are usually only possessed by highly-qualified robotic developers. While formal methods that help developers in the creation and design of robotic applications exist, they must be explicitly customized to be impactful in the robotics domain and to support effectively the growth of the robotic market. Specifically, the robotic market is asking for techniques that: (i) enable a systematic and rigorous design of robotic applications though high-level languages; and (ii) enable the automatic synthesis of low-level controllers, which allow robots to achieve their missions. To address these problems we present the PuRSUE (Planner for RobotS in Uncontrollable Environments) approach, which aims to support developers in the rigorous and systematic design of high-level run-time control strategies for robotic applications. The approach includes PuRSUE-ML a high-level language that allows for modeling the environment, the agents deployed therein, and their missions. PuRSUE is able to check automatically whether a controller that allows robots to achieve their missions might exist and, then, it synthesizes a controller. We evaluated how PuRSUE helps designers in modeling robotic applications, the effectiveness of its automatic computation of controllers, and how the approach supports the deployment of controllers on actual robots. The evaluation is based on 13 scenarios derived from 3 different robotic applications presented in the literature. The results show that: (i) PuRSUE-ML is effective in supporting designers in the formal modeling of robotic applications compared to a direct encoding of robotic applications in low-level modeling formalisms; (ii) PuRSUE enables the automatic generation of controllers that are difficult to create manually; and (iii) the plans generated with PuRSUE are indeed effective when deployed on actual robots.