Limits of Specifiability for Sensor-Based Robotic Planning Tasks

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 precise 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.