A Smooth Robustness Measure of Signal Temporal Logic for Symbolic Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel smooth robustness measure for Signal Temporal Logic that is sound, everywhere smooth, and asymptotically complete, improving the efficiency and reliability of symbolic control synthesis.

Contribution

A new robustness approximation for STL that combines smoothness, soundness, and asymptotic completeness, with adjustable conservativeness and completeness.

Findings

The proposed measure is smooth everywhere and sound.

It enables faster gradient-based optimization methods.

It offers an explicit tradeoff between conservativeness and completeness.

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing use of Signal Temporal Logic (STL) as a formal specification language for symbolic control, due to its expressiveness and closeness to natural language. Furthermore, STL specifications can be encoded as cost functions using STL's robust semantics, transforming the synthesis problem into an optimization problem. Unfortunately, these cost functions are non-smooth and non-convex, and exact solutions using mixed-integer programming do not scale well. Recent work has focused on using smooth approximations of robustness, which enable faster gradient-based methods to find local maxima, at the expense of soundness and/or completeness. We propose a novel robustness approximation that is smooth everywhere, sound, and asymptotically complete. Our approach combines the benefits of existing approximations, while enabling an explicit tradeoff between conservativeness and completeness.