Document Type
Conference Paper
Subject Area
CPS Theory, CPS Formal Methods, CPS Model-Based Design
Date of this Version
8-2017
Publication Source
IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications, 2017
Abstract
Modern control systems, like controllers for swarms of quadrotors, must satisfy complex control objectives while withstanding a wide range of disturbances, from bugs in their software to attacks on their sensors and changes in their environments. These requirements go beyond stability and tracking, and involve temporal and sequencing constraints on system response to various events. This work formalizes the requirements as formulas in Metric Temporal Logic (MTL), and designs a controller that maximizes the robustness of the MTL formula. Formally, if the system satisfies the formula with robustness r, then any disturbance of size less than r cannot cause it to violate the formula. Because robustness is not differentiable, this work provides arbitrarily precise, infinitely differentiable, approximations of it, thus enabling the use of powerful gradient descent optimizers. Experiments on a temperature control example and a two-quadrotor system demonstrate that this approach to controller design outper- forms existing approaches to robustness maximization based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming and stochastic heuristics. Moreover, it is not constrained to linear systems.
Keywords
Temporal Logic, Robustness, Optimization, Control with MTL specifications
Recommended Citation
Yash Vardhan Pant, Houssam Abbas, and Rahul Mangharam, "Smooth Operator: Control using the Smooth Robustness of Temporal Logic", IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications, 2017 . August 2017.
Bib Tex
@INPROCEEDINGS{PantAM17_CCTA_accepted, author={Y. V. Pant and H. Abbas and R. Mangharam}, booktitle={IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications, CCTA}, title={Smooth Operator: Control using the Smooth Robustness of Temporal Logic}, year={2017} }
Date Posted: 08 June 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.