Visibility-based Planners for Mobile Robots Capable to Handle Path Existence Queries in Temporal Logic

Abstract

Over the past few years, sampling based planner algorithms have been applied to planning queries formulated in path existence temporal logic, a formal system that allows more complex specifications on a solution path and is useful for task planning for mobile robots or synthesizing controllers for dynamical systems. In this paper, we extend the visibility heuristic to planners capable to handle finite path existence temporal logic queries. Our interest is justified by the visibility heuristic's ability to construct small roadmaps that are fast to search. We find that the visibility heuristic must be amended so that it can reliably handle temporal logic queries and we propose a suitable modification of the heuristic. We then present a method to extract a solution path from a roadmap, if such a solution exists. Finally, we show how the planner can be used to generate looping paths by augmenting it with a gap reduction step.

Keywords

• collision avoidance
• computational efficiency
• mobile robots
• motion planning
• reachability analysis
• robot motion