Limits of specifiability for sensor-based robotic planning tasks

Abstract There is now a large body of techniques, many based on formal methods, for describing and realizing complex robotics tasks, including those involving a variety of rich goals and time-extended behavior. This paper explores the limits of what sorts of tasks are specifiable, examining how the specific grounding of specifications —that is, whether the specification is given in terms of the robot's states, its actions and observations, its knowledge, or some other information— is crucial to whether a given task can be specified. While prior work included some description of particular choices for this grounding, our contribution treats this aspect as a first-class citizen: we introduce notation to deal with a large class of problems, and examine how the grounding affects what tasks can be posed. The results demonstrate that certain classes of tasks are specifiable under different combinations of groundings.

@inproceedings{SakSheOKa25,
  author = {Ba\c{s}ak Sak\c{c}ak and Dylan A. Shell and Jason M. O'Kane},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
               Automation},
  note = {To appear},
  title = {Limits of specifiability for sensor-based robotic planning
           tasks},
  year = {2025}
}