Minimum-Violation Velocity Planning with Temporal Logic Constraints

Motion planning for autonomous agents requires compliance with a variety of constraints. However, in some situations, all constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied, e.g., due to the misbehavior of other traffic participants. In such situations, one strategy for guaranteeing a feasible behavior of the system is deliberately ignoring less important constraints while maintaining the satisfaction of more important ones. We address this problem by presenting a novel velocity planner for an autonomous shuttle that violates temporal logic constraints as little as possible in the sense that important constraints are violated last. In particular, we provide an
$A$
*-based velocity planner that minimally violates a hierarchically ordered set of constraints formalized in signal temporal logic. We apply our approach to challenging scenarios from the CommonRoad benchmark suite, showing that our proposed method yields easily interpretable and explainable decisions.