Planning With Uncertain Specifications (PUnS)

Abstract

Reward engineering is crucial to high performance in reinforcement learning systems. Prior research into reward design has largely focused on Markovian functions representing the reward. While there has been research into expressing non-Markovian rewards as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas, this has been limited to a single formula serving as the task specification. However, in many real-world applications, task specifications can only be expressed as a belief over LTL formulas. In this paper, we introduce planning with uncertain specifications (PUnS), a novel formulation that addresses the challenge posed by non-Markovian specifications expressed as beliefs over LTL formulas. We present four criteria that capture the semantics of satisfying a belief over specifications for different applications, and analyze the implications of these criteria within a synthetic domain. We demonstrate the existence of an equivalent markov decision process (MDP) for any instance of PUnS. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on the real-world task of setting a dinner table automatically with a robot that inferred task specifications from human demonstrations.

Publication
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (Presented at ICRA 2020)