Motion Planning Under Temporal Logic Specifications In Semantically Unknown Environments

This paper addresses a motion planning problem to achieve spatio-temporal-logical tasks, expressed by syntactically co-safe linear temporal logic specifications (scLTLnext), in uncertain environments. Here, the uncertainty is modeled as some probabilistic knowledge on the semantic labels of the environment. For example, the task is "first go to region 1, then go to region 2"; however, the exact locations of regions 1 and 2 are not known a priori, instead a probabilistic belief is available. We propose a novel automata-theoretic approach, where a special product automaton is constructed to capture the uncertainty related to semantic labels, and a reward function is designed for each edge of this product automaton. The proposed algorithm utilizes value iteration for online replanning. We show some theoretical results and present some simulations/experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.