[Submitted on 24 Sep 2026]
Title:Realizability Is Not Enough: Encoding, Liveness, and Auditing of Synthesized Robot Supervisors
View a PDF of the paper titled Realizability Is Not Enough: Encoding, Liveness, and Auditing of Synthesized Robot Supervisors, by David C. Conner and 9 other authors
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Abstract:High-level robotic supervisors coordinate capabilities whose reported outcomes determine the robot's next action. Reactive synthesis can generate such supervisors with formal guarantees, but deployment requires more than proving a Generalized Reactivity (1) (GR(1)) specification realizable. Designers must encode failure-prone capabilities, choose liveness assumptions that match retry intent, audit strategies, and translate them into robot software. We present an open-source pipeline for Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 Flexible Behavior Engine (FlexBE) supervisors that generates capability-based GR(1) specifications, analyzes assumptions before synthesis, audits strategies, reduces states with a behavior-preservation proof, and emits executable state machines.
Across four case studies (six comparisons), including hardware on two quadcopter platforms, we compare enumerated and one-hot encodings and two liveness formulations. Under the tested backend, enumerated encoding usually synthesizes faster, although fewer propositions do not reliably predict smaller controllers or lower symbolic cost. System-Goal without pending memory is the only liveness treatment confirmed to yield executable controllers under both encodings across the reported grid; Fair-Outcome can permit realizable cycles without designer-intended completion. For this backend and model, we recommend enumerated encoding with System-Goal and auditing every realized strategy, since proposition count and realizability do not measure deployability.
The auditor is sound and complete for four structural defect classes (protocol violations, deadlocks, bounded-failure violations, goal-unreachable traps) but is not a general liveness verifier, and the reduction preserves capability-level behavior. Together, these stages narrow the gap between formal realizability and controllers that pass protocol and structural-progress checks.
Comments: 88 pages, 14 figures. Includes detailed technical appendices and experimental results for four application domains
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)
MSC classes: 68T40, 68Q60, 93C65
ACM classes: I.2.9; D.2.4; F.3.1
Cite as: arXiv:2609.30460 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2609.30460v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30460
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: David Conner [view email] [v1] Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:51:13 UTC (10,241 KB)
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