Resource-Performance Trade-off Analysis for Mobile Robot Design

The design of mobile autonomous robots is challenging due to the limited on-board resources such as processing power and energy. A promising approach is to generate intelligent schedules that reduce the resource consumption while maintaining best performance, or more interestingly, to trade off reduced resource consumption for a slightly lower but still acceptable level of performance. In this paper, we provide a framework to aid designers in exploring such resource-performance trade-offs and finding schedules for mobile robots, guided by questions such as "what is the minimum resource budget required to achieve a given level of performance?" The framework is based on a quantitative multi-objective verification technique which, for a collection of possibly conflicting objectives, produces the Pareto front that contains all the optimal trade-offs that are achievable. The designer then selects a specific Pareto point based on the resource constraints and desired performance level, and a correct-by-construction schedule that meets those constraints is automatically generated. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework on several robotic scenarios in both simulations and experiments with encouraging results.

Attraction-Based Receding Horizon Path Planning with Temporal Logic Constraints

Our goal in this paper is to plan the motion of a robot in a partitioned environment with dynamically changing, locally sensed rewards. We assume that arbitrary assumptions on the reward dynamics can be given. The robot aims to accomplish a high-level temporal logic surveillance mission and to locally optimize the collection of the rewards in the visited regions. These two objectives often conflict and only a compromise between them can be reached. We address this issue by taking into consideration a user-defined preference function that captures the trade-off between the importance of collecting high rewards and the importance of making progress towards a surveyed region. Our solution leverages ideas from the automata-based approach to model checking. We demonstrate the utilization and benefits of the suggested framework in an illustrative example.