Algorithms for Autonomous Urban Navigation with Formal Specifications

This thesis addresses problems in planning and control of autonomous agents. The central theme of this work is that integration of “low-level control synthesis” and “high-level decision making ” is essential to devise robust algorithms with provable guarantees on performance. We pursue two main directions here. The first part considers planning and control algorithms that satisfy temporal specifications expressed using formal languages. We focus on task specifications that become feasible only if some of the specifications are violated and compute a control law that minimizes the level of unsafety of the system while guaranteeing that it still satisfies the task specification. Examples in this domai