Semantic Abstraction-Guided Motion Planning for scLTL Missions in Unknown Environments

Complex mission specifications can be often specified through temporal logics, such as Linear Temporal Logic and its syntactically co-safe fragment, scLTL. Finding trajectories that satisfy such specifications becomes hard if the robot is to fulfil the mission in an initially unknown environment, where neither locations of regions or objects of interest in the environment nor the obstacle space are known a priori. We propose an algorithm that, while exploring the environment, learns important semantic dependencies in the form of a semantic abstraction, and uses it to bias the growth of an Rapidly-exploring random graph towards faster mission completion. Our approach leads to finding trajectories that are much shorter than those found by the sequential approach, which first explores and then plans. Simulations comparing our solution to the sequential approach, carried out in 100 randomized office-like environments, show more than 50% reduction in the trajectory length.