Synthesis of Control Protocols for Autonomous Systems

Abstract

This article provides a review of control protocol synthesis techniques that incorporate methodologies from formal methods and control theory to provide correctness guarantee for different types of autonomous systems, including those with discrete and continuous state space. The correctness of the system is defined with respect to a given specification expressed as a formula in linear temporal logic to precisely describe the desired properties of the system. The formalism presented in this article admits nondeterminism, allowing uncertainties in the system to be captured. A particular emphasis is on alleviating some of the difficulties, e.g., heterogeneity in the underlying dynamics and computational complexity, that naturally arise in the construction of control protocols for autonomous systems.