Optimal Control of Mixed Logical Dynamical Systems with Long-Term Temporal Logic Specifications

Abstract

We present a mathematical programming-based method for control of large a class of nonlinear systems subject to temporal logic task specifications. We consider Mixed Logical Dynamical (MLD) systems, which include linear hybrid automata, constrained linear systems, and piecewise affine systems. We specify tasks using a fragment of linear temporal logic (LTL) that allows both finite- and infinite-horizon properties to be specified, including tasks such as surveillance, periodic walking, repeated assembly, and environmental monitoring. Our method directly encodes an LTL formula as mixed-integer linear constraints on the MLD system, instead of computing a finite abstraction. This approach is efficient; for common tasks the formulation may use significantly fewer binary variables than related approaches. In simulation, we solve non-trivial temporal logic motion planning tasks for high-dimensional continuous systems using our approach.