Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
PuRSUE -from specification of robotic environments to synthesis of controllers
Download PDF
Download PDF
  • Original Article
  • Open Access
  • Published: 23 March 2020

PuRSUE -from specification of robotic environments to synthesis of controllers

  • Marcello M. Bersani1,
  • Matteo Soldo1,
  • Claudio Menghi3,
  • Patrizio Pelliccione4,5 &
  • …
  • Matteo Rossi2 

Formal Aspects of Computing volume 32, pages 187–227 (2020)Cite this article

  • 480 Accesses

  • 5 Citations

  • Metrics details

Abstract

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.

Download to read the full article text

Working on a manuscript?

Avoid the common mistakes

References

  1. Alur, R., Dill, D.L.: Model-checking in dense real-time. Inf Comput 104(1), 2–34 (1993)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Alur, R., Dill, D.L.: A theory of timed automata. Theor Comput Sci 126(2), 183–235 (1994)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Asarin E, Maler O, Pnueli A (1995) Symbolic controller synthesis for discrete and timed systems. In: Hybrid Systems II. Springer

  4. Askarpour M, Mandrioli D, Rossi M, Vicentini F (2017) Modeling operator behavior in the safety analysis of collaborative robotic applications. In: Computer safety, reliability, and security. Springer, pp 89–104

  5. Askarpour, M., Mandrioli, D., Rossi, M., Vicentini, F.: Formal model of human erroneous behavior for safety analysis in collaborative robotics. Robot Comput Integr Manuf 57, 465–476 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Behrmann G, Cougnard A, David A, Fleury E, Larsen KG, Lime D (2007) Uppaal-tiga: time for playing games!. In: Computer aided verification. Springer, pp 121–125

  7. Barbosa, F.S., Duberg, D., Jensfelt, P., Tůmová, J.: Guiding autonomous exploration with signal temporal logic. IEEE Robot Autom Lett 4(4), 3332–3339 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Behrmann G, David A, Larsen KG (2004) A tutorial on uppaal. In: Formal methods for the design of real-time systems. Springer, pp 200–236

  9. Bouyer P (2009) Model-checking timed temporal logics. In: Electronic notes in theoretical computer science. pp 231:323–341. Workshop on Methods for Modalities (M4M5 2007)

  10. Barrett, A., Rabideau, G., Estlin, T., Chien, S.: Coordinated continual planning methods for cooperating rovers. IEEE Aerosp Electron Syst Mag 22(2), 27–33 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Bozhinoski D, Ruscio DD, Malavolta I, Pelliccione P, Tivoli M (2015) FLYAQ: enabling non-expert users to specify and generate missions of autonomous multicopters. In: International conference on automated software engineering. IEEE, pp 801–806

  12. Bersani, M.M., Rossi, M., Pietro, P.S.: A tool for deciding the satisfiability of continuous-time metric temporal logic. Acta Inf 53(2), 171–206 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  13. Berry, G., Sethi, R.: From regular expressions to deterministic automata. Theor Comput Sci 48, 117–126 (1986)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Ceballos A, Bensalem S, Cesta A, de Silva L, Fratini S, Ingrand F, Ocón J, Orlandini A, Py F, Rajan K, Rasconi R, van Winnendael M (2011) A goal oriented autonomous controller for space exploration. http://robotics.estec.esa.int/ASTRA/Astra2011/Astra2011_Proceedings.zip1

  15. Cimatti, A., Clarke, E., Giunchiglia, F., Roveri, M.: NuSMV: a new symbolic model checker. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transf 2(4), 410–425 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Cassez F, David A, Fleury E, Larsen KG, Lime D (2005) Efficient on-the-fly algorithms for the analysis of timed games. In: Concurrency theory. Springer, pp 66–80

  17. Campusano, M., Fabry, J.: Live robot programming: The language, its implementation, and robot API independence. Sci Comput Program 133, 1–19 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Chen T, Forejt V, Kwiatkowska M, Parker D, Simaitis A (2013) Prism-games: a model checker for stochastic multi-player games. In: International conference on TOOLS and algorithms for the construction and analysis of systems. Springer, pp 185–191

  19. Cimatti A, Hunsberger L, Micheli A, Roveri M (2014) Using timed game automata to synthesize execution strategies for simple temporal networks with uncertainty. In: AAAI. AAAI Press, pp 2242–2249

  20. Cassez F, Larsen KG, Raskin JF, Reynier PA (2011) Timed controller synthesis: an industrial case study. Deliverable no.: D5. 12 Title of Deliverable: Industrial Handbook, p 150

  21. Cesta A, Orlandini A, Umbrico A (2013) Toward a general purpose software environment for timeline-based planning. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37835325.pdf

  22. Ciccozzi, F., Di, R.D., Malavolta, I., Pelliccione, P.: Adopting MDE for specifying and executing civilian missions of mobile multi-robot systems. IEEE Access 4, 6451–6466 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Damas, B., Lima, P.: Stochastic discrete event model of a multi-robot team playing an adversarial game. IFAC Proc 37(8), 974–979 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Farinelli, A., Iocchi, L., Nardi, D.: Multirobot systems: a classification focused on coordination. Trans Syst Man Cybern Part B (Cybern) 34(5), 2015–2028 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Finucane C, Jing G, Kress-Gazit H (2010) LTLMoP: Experimenting with language, temporal logic and robot control. In: Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE, pp 1988–1993

  26. Farrell M, Luckcuck M, Fisher M (2018) Robotics and integrated formal methods: necessity meets opportunity. In: Integrated formal methods. Springer, pp 161–171

  27. Foote T, Wise M (2019) Turtlebot home page, Last access 27 March https://www.turtlebot.com/

  28. Gainer P, Dixon C, Dautenhahn K, Fisher M, Hustadt U, Saunders J, Webster M (2017) Cruton: automatic verification of a robotic assistant's behaviours. In: Critical systems: formal methods and automated verification. Springer, pp 119–133

  29. Götz S, Leuthäuser M, Reimann J, Schroeter J, Wende C, Wilke C, Aßmann U (2011) A role-based language for collaborative robot applications. In: International symposium on leveraging applications of formal methods, verification and validation. Springer, pp 1–15

  30. Gigante N, Montanari A, Mayer MC, Orlandini A, Reynolds M (2018) A game-theoretic approach to timeline-based planning with uncertainty. arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.04837

  31. García S, Pelliccione P, Menghi C, Berger T, Bures T (2019) High-level mission specification for multiple robots. In: International conference on software language engineering. ACM, pp 127–140

  32. Jessen JJ, Rasmussen JI, Larsen KG, David A (2007) Guided controller synthesis for climate controller using uppaal tiga. In: Formal modeling and analysis of timed systems. Springer, pp 227–240

  33. Konur S, Dixon C, Fisher M (2010) Formal verification of probabilistic swarm behaviours. In: International conference on swarm intelligence. Springer, pp 440–447

  34. Kress-Gazit, H., Lahijanian, M., Raman, V.: Synthesis for robots: guarantees and feedback for robot behavior. Ann Rev Control Robot Auton Syst 1(1), 211–236 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Kwiatkowska M, Norman G, Parker D (2011) Prism 4.0: verification of probabilistic real-time systems. In: Computer aided verification. Springer, pp 585–591

  36. Kunze L, Roehm T, Beetz M (2011) Towards semantic robot description languages. In: International conference on robotics and automation. IEEE, pp 5589–5595

  37. Luckcuck M, Farrell M, Dennis LA, Dixon C, Fisher M (2019) Formal specification and verification of autonomous robotic systems: a survey. ACM Comput Surv 52(5):100:1–100:41

  38. Largouët C, Krichen O, Zhao Y (2016) Temporal planning with extended timed automata. In: International conference on tools with artificial intelligence. IEEE, pp 522–529

  39. Lignos, C., Raman, V., Finucane, C., Marcus, M., Kress-Gazit, H.: Provably correct reactive control from natural language. Auton Robots 38(1), 89–105 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Loetzsch M, Risler M, Jüngel M (2006) XABSL-A pragmatic approach to behavior engineering. In: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSG, pp 5124–5129

  41. Lopes, Y.K., Trenkwalder, S.M., Leal, A.B., Dodd, T.J., Groß, R.: Supervisory control theory applied to swarm robotics. Swarm Intell 10(1), 65–97 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Morse J, Araiza-Illan D, Lawry J, Richards A, Eder K (2016) Formal specification and analysis of autonomous systems under partial compliance. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.01082

  43. Menghi C, García S, Pelliccione P, Tůmová J (2018) Multi-robot LTL planning under uncertainty. In: International symposium on formal methods. Springer, pp 399–417

  44. Menghi C, García S, Pelliccione P, Tůmová J (2018) Towards multi-robot applications planning under uncertainty. In: International conference on software engineering: companion proceeedings. ACM, pp 438–439

  45. Mayer MC, Orlandini A (2015) An executable semantics of flexible plans in terms of timed game automata. In: Temporal Representation and Reasoning. IEEE, pp 160–169

  46. Maoz S, Ringert JO (2019) Spectra. http://smlab.cs.tau.ac.il/syntech/spectra/userguide.pdf

  47. Miyazawa A, Ribeiro P, Li W, Cavalcanti A, Timmis J (2017) Automatic property checking of robotic applications. In: International conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE/RJS, pp 3869–3876

  48. Miyazawa A, Ribeiro P, Li W, Cavalcanti A, Timmis J, Woodcock J (2019) RoboChart: modelling and verification of the functional behaviour of robotic applications. Softw Syst Model

  49. Menghi C, Tsigkanos C, Berger T, Pelliccione P, Ghezzi C (2018) Poster: property specification patterns for robotic missions. In: International conference on software engineering: companion proceeedings. IEEE/ACM, pp 434–435

  50. Menghi C, Tsigkanos C, Berger T, Pelliccione P (2019) Psalm: specification of dependable robotic missions. In: International conference on software engineering: companion proceedings. IEEE/ACM, pp 99–102

  51. Menghi C, Tsigkanos C, Pelliccione P, Ghezzi C, Berger T (2019) Specification patterns for robotic missions. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, pp 1–1

  52. https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/robots/nao/find-out-more-about-nao

  53. Nordmann A, Hochgeschwender N, Wrede S (2014) A survey on domain-specific languages in robotics. In: International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots. Springer, pp 195–206

  54. Orlandini A, Finzi A, Cesta A, Fratini S, Tronci E (2011) Enriching apsi with validation capabilities: The keen environment and its use in robotics. In: Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation. http://robotics.estec.esa.int/ASTRA/Astra2011/Astra2011_Proceedings.zip1

  55. Online appendix, (2019) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/117-MVWDYYo-6Gir6KAzlVTsvshGu2Uvf

  56. Peter H, Ehlers R, Mattmüller R (2011) Synthia: Verification and synthesis for timed automata. In: International conference on computer aided verification. Springer, pp 649–655

  57. Pinheiro LP, Lopes YK, Leal AB, Junior RS (2015) Nadzoru: a software tool for supervisory control of discrete event systems. IFAC-PapersOnLine 48(7):182 – 187. International Workshop on Dependable Control of Discrete Systems

  58. PuRSUE - Planner for RobotS in Uncontrollable Environments, (2019). https://github.com/deib-polimi/PuRSUE

  59. Quigley M, Conley K, Gerkey B, Faust J, Foote T, Leibs J, Wheeler R, Ng AY (2009) ROS: an open-source robot operating system. In: ICRA workshop on open source software, vol 3. IEEE, p 5

  60. Quattrini Li A, Fioratto R, Amigoni F, Isler V (2018) A search-based approach to solve pursuit-evasion games with limited visibility in polygonal environments. In: International conference on autonomous agents and multiAgent systems. ACM, pp 1693–1701

  61. Rugg-Gunn N, Cameron S (1994) A formal semantics for multiple vehicle task and motion planning. In: International conference on robotics and automation. IEEE, pp 2464–2469

  62. Ruscio DD, Malavolta I, Pelliccione P, Tivoli M (2016) Automatic generation of detailed flight plans from high-level mission descriptions. In: International conference on model driven engineering languages and systems. ACM, pp 45–55

  63. Siciliano, B., Khatib, O.: Springer handbook of robotics, 2nd edn. Springer, Berlin (2016)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  64. Tůmová J, Dimarogonas DV (2014) A receding horizon approach to multi-agent planning from local LTL specifications. In: 2014 American Control Conference. IEEE, pp 1775–1780

  65. Tůmová, J., Dimarogonas, D.V.: Multi-agent planning under local LTL specifications and event-based synchronization. Automatica 70, 239–248 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  66. Truszkowski W, Rash J, Hinchey M, Rouff C. A survey of formal methods for intelligent swarms. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050156631.pdf

  67. Tunggal, T.P., Supriyanto, A., Faishal, I., Pambudi, I., et al.: Pursuit algorithm for robot trash can based on fuzzy-cell decomposition. Int J Electr Comput Eng 6(6), 2863 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  68. Vicentini, F., Askarpour, M., Rossi, M., Mandrioli, D.: Safety assessment of collaborative robotics through automated formal verification. IEEE Trans Robot 31(1), 42–61 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  69. Ecobot. https://youtu.be/w6SfCmgdCsk, https://youtu.be/XmOY-urEDD0

  70. Verginis CK, Vrohidis C, Bechlioulis CP, Kyriakopoulos KJ, Dimarogonas DV (2019) Reconfigurable motion planning and control in obstacle cluttered environments under timed temporal tasks. In: International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE, pp 951–957

  71. International Federation of Robotics. https://ifr.org/worldrobotics/

  72. Zamani, M., Arcak, M.: Compositional abstraction for networks of control systems: a dissipativity approach. IEEE Trans Control Netw Syst 5(3), 1003–1015 (2018)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  73. Zamani, M., Pola, G., Mazo, M., Tabuada, P.: Symbolic models for nonlinear control systems without stability assumptions. Trans Autom Control 57(7), 1804–1809 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Centre of EXcellence on Connected, Geo-Localized and Cybersecure Vehicle (EX-Emerge), funded by Italian Government under CIPE resolution n. 70/2017 (Aug. 7, 2017). The work is also supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme GA No. 694277 and GA No. 731869 (Co4Robots).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Marcello M. Bersani & Matteo Soldo

  2. Dipartimento di Meccanica, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Matteo Rossi

  3. SnT - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Claudio Menghi

  4. Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Patrizio Pelliccione

  5. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Patrizio Pelliccione

Authors
  1. Marcello M. Bersani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Matteo Soldo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Claudio Menghi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Patrizio Pelliccione
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Matteo Rossi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patrizio Pelliccione.

Additional information

Ana Cavalcanti and Pedro Ribeiro

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bersani, M.M., Soldo, M., Menghi, C. et al. PuRSUE -from specification of robotic environments to synthesis of controllers. Form Asp Comp 32, 187–227 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-020-00509-0

Download citation

  • Received: 01 April 2019

  • Accepted: 28 February 2020

  • Published: 23 March 2020

  • Issue Date: July 2020

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-020-00509-0

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Keywords

  • Robotics
  • software engineering
  • controller synthesis
  • formal methods
Download PDF

Working on a manuscript?

Avoid the common mistakes

Advertisement

Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips

Switch Edition
  • Academic Edition
  • Corporate Edition
  • Home
  • Impressum
  • Legal information
  • Privacy statement
  • California Privacy Statement
  • How we use cookies
  • Manage cookies/Do not sell my data
  • Accessibility
  • FAQ
  • Contact us
  • Affiliate program

Not affiliated

Springer Nature

© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Part of Springer Nature.