Optimal Control of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Finite Linear Temporal Logic Constraints

Krishna C Kalagarla, Dhruva Kartik, Rahul Jain, Pierluigi Nuzzo, Ashutosh Nayyar, Dongming Shen

Keywords: POMDP Planning, Temporal Logic

TL;DR: Reward optimal control of POMDPs with Linear Temporal Logic constraints

Abstract: Autonomous agents often operate in environments where the state is partially observed. In addition to maximizing their cumulative reward, agents must execute complex tasks with rich temporal and logical structures. These tasks can be expressed using temporal logic languages like finite linear temporal logic. This paper, for the first time, provides a structured framework for designing agent policies that maximize the reward while ensuring that the probability of satisfying the temporal logic specification is sufficiently high. We reformulate the problem as a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and provide a novel approach that can leverage off-the-shelf unconstrained POMDP solvers for solving it. Our approach guarantees approximate optimality and constraint satisfaction with high probability. We demonstrate its effectiveness by implementing it on several models of interest.