Automatic synthesis of robot controllers for tasks with locative prepositions

This paper describes the synthesis of correct robot control from high-level tasks that include non-projective locative prepositions. Here, locative prepositions such as `near' and `between' are used to refer to regions in the robot's workspace and are part of a high-level task description such as “Always stay near room 1” or “Visit the area between room 2 and room 3”. These prepositions induce a discrete abstraction of the workspace which, together with the rest of the task, is used to synthesize a correct-by-construction robot controller such that the robot is guaranteed to behave as expected, if the task is feasible. This work presents an important step towards allowing linguistic control of robots that is both intuitive and provably correct.