Synthesis of Shared Control Protocols with Provable Safety and Performance Guarantees

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal method for synthesizing shared control protocols that guarantee safety and performance in robots, accounting for human variability and using nonlinear programming techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formalism for blending human and autonomous commands with provable safety and performance guarantees, addressing scalability with alternative methods.

Findings

Successfully synthesizes control protocols satisfying temporal logic specifications.

Demonstrates feasibility and scalability through experimental evaluation.

Provides a formal framework accommodating human unpredictability.

Abstract

We formalize synthesis of shared control protocols with correctness guarantees for temporal logic specifications. More specifically, we introduce a modeling formalism in which both a human and an autonomy protocol can issue commands to a robot towards performing a certain task. These commands are blended into a joint input to the robot. The autonomy protocol is synthesized using an abstraction of possible human commands accounting for randomness in decisions caused by factors such as fatigue or incomprehensibility of the problem at hand. The synthesis is designed to ensure that the resulting robot behavior satisfies given safety and performance specifications, e.g., in temporal logic. Our solution is based on nonlinear programming and we address the inherent scalability issue by presenting alternative methods. We assess the feasibility and the scalability of the approach by an experimental evaluation.