Receding Horizon Control in Dynamic Environments from Temporal Logic Specifications

We present a control strategy for an autonomous vehicle that is required to satisfy a rich mission specification over service requests occurring at the regions of a partitioned environment. The overall mission specification consists of a temporal logic statement over a set of static, a priori known requests, and a servicing priority order over a set of dynamic requests that can be sensed locally. Our approach is based on two main steps. First, we construct an abstraction for the motion of the vehicle in the environment by using input output linearization and assignment of vector fields to the regions in the partition. Second, a receding horizon controller computes local plans within the sensing range of the vehicle such that both local and global mission specifications are satisfied. We implement and evaluate our method in an experimental setup consisting of a quadrotor performing a persistent surveillance task over a planar grid environment.