MIT talk: Translating reactive tasks to reactive controllers

SPECIAL SEMINAR
Hadas Kress-Gazit
University of Pennsylvania
March 5, 2008, 11:00 a.m. 32-G449 (Stata Center)

Translating reactive tasks to reactive controllers

Abstract: How can we automatically create controllers for our system, be it a robot or a team of UAVs, that are guaranteed to satisfy reactive high level tasks such as "Search for Nemo and if you find him transmit his location"? How do we transition from systems that require each behavior or task to be hand coded, tested and verified to systems that allow anyone to just specify an abstract mission and then the system takes care of the rest while taking into account dynamically changing environments? As systems become more sophisticated and mechanically complex, providing theory and tools that answer these questions is crucial for creating truly autonomous systems. In this talk, Hadas Kress-Gazit will present a formal approach to creating robot controllers that ensure the robot satisfies a given high level task. She will describe a framework in which a user specifies a complex and reactive task in structured English. This task is then automatically translated, using logic and tools from the formal methods world, into a hybrid controller. This controller is guaranteed to control the robot such that its motion and actions satisfy the intended task, under some assumptions, in a variety of different environments. As an example, she will show how tasks related to DARPA's Urban challenge can be handled using this framework.

http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=1777