Towards Formal Synthesis of Reactive Controllers for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation

Sandeep Chinchali, Scott C. Livingston, Ufuk Topcu, Joel W. Burdick, and Richard M. Murray
2012 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

In robotic finger gaiting, fingers continuously manipulate an object until joint limitations or mechanical limitations periodically force a switch of grasp. Current approaches to gait planning and control are slow, lack formal guarantees on correctness, and are generally not reactive to changes in object geometry. To address these issues, we apply advances in formal methods to model a gait subject to external perturbations as a two-player game between a finger controller and its adversarial environment. High-level specifications are expressed in linear temporal logic (LTL) and low-level control primitives are designed for continuous kinematics. Simulations of planar manipulation with our synthesized correct-by-construction gait controller demonstrate the benefits of this approach.

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