On the Software Engineering Challenges of Applying Reactive Synthesis to Robotics

Reactive synthesis is an automated procedure to obtain a correct-by-construction reactive system from its temporal logic specification. This short paper discusses the software engineering challenges in applying reactive synthesis to robotics, beyond the synthesis algorithms themselves, including the challenge of writing declarative specifications, the challenge of abstraction of data and time, and the challenge of availability of an adequate development process supported by related tools. The identification and description of the challenges are based on our experience in building a development environment for reactive synthesis and applying it to the construction of about 10 different autonomous Lego robots. We describe the challenges using concrete examples from one of the robots built in our lab.