Reactive Temporal Logic-based Planning and Control for Interactive Robotic Tasks

Robots interacting with humans must be safe, reactive and adapt online to unforeseen environmental and task changes. Achieving these requirements concurrently is a challenge as interactive planners lack formal safety guarantees, while safe motion planners lack flexibility to adapt. To tackle this, we propose a modular control architecture that generates both safe and reactive motion plans for human-robot interaction by integrating temporal logic-based discrete task level plans with continuous Dynamical System (DS)-based motion plans. We formulate a reactive temporal logic formula that enables users to define task specifications through structured language, and propose a planning algorithm at the task level that generates a sequence of desired robot behaviors while being adaptive to environmental changes. At the motion level, we incorporate control Lyapunov functions and control barrier functions to compute stable and safe continuous motion plans for two types of robot behaviors: (i) complex, possibly periodic motions given by autonomous DS and (ii) time-critical tasks specified by Signal Temporal Logic (STL). Our methodology is demonstrated on the Franka robot arm performing wiping tasks on a whiteboard and a mannequin that is compliant to human interactions and adaptive to environmental changes.

Authors

• Farhad Nawaz
• Shaoting Peng
• Lars Lindemann
• Nadia Figueroa
• Nikolai Matni

Keywords

• Heuristic algorithms
• Human-robot interaction
• Manipulators
• Planning
• Safety
• Logic
• Time factors
• Dynamical systems
• Intelligent robots
• Lyapunov methods
• Interactive
• Environmental Changes
• System Dynamics
• Specific Tasks
• Path Planning
• Periodic Motion
• Language Structure
• Continuous Motion
• Planning Algorithm
• Robot Behavior
• Stable Motion
• Temporal Logic
• Discrete Tasks
• Continuous Dynamical Systems
• Time Step
• Environmental Effects
• Discrete-time
• Optimal Control
• Morphine
• Control Signal
• Signal Space
• Task Planning
• Quadratic Programming
• Safe Interaction
• Feedback Control Law
• Shortest Path
• Human Gestures
• Mixed Strategy
• Reference Velocity
• Control Input