Minimum-Violation Planning for Autonomous Systems: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

• Published in: Proceedings of the American Control Conference pp. 4866 - 4872
• Main Authors: Wongpiromsarn, Tichakorn, Slutsky, Konstantin, Frazzoli, Emilio, Topcu, Ufuk
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: American Automatic Control Council 25.05.2021
• Subjects: Autonomous vehicles; Collision avoidance; Planning; Safety; Simulation; Trajectory
• ISSN: 2378-5861
• DOI: 10.23919/ACC50511.2021.9483174

This paper considers the problem of computing an optimal trajectory for an autonomous system that is subject to a set of potentially conflicting rules. First, we introduce the concept of prioritized safety specifications, where each rule is expressed as a temporal logic formula with its associated weight and priority. The optimality is defined based on the violation of such prioritized safety specifications. We then introduce a class of temporal logic formulas called si-FLTL Gx and develop an efficient, incremental sampling-based approach to solve this minimum-violation planning problem with guarantees on asymptotic optimality. We illustrate the application of the proposed approach in autonomous vehicles, showing that si-FLTLGx formulas are sufficiently expressive to describe many traffic rules. Finally, we discuss practical considerations and present simulation results for a vehicle overtaking scenario.