SCOTS: A Tool for the Synthesis of Symbolic Controllers

Abstract

We introduce SCOTS a software tool for the automatic controller synthesis for nonlinear control systems based on symbolic models, also known as discrete abstractions. The tool accepts a differential equation as the description of a nonlinear control system. It uses a Lipschitz type estimate on the right-hand-side of the differential equation together with a number of discretization parameters to compute a symbolic model that is related with the original control system via a feedback refinement relation. The tool supports the computation of minimal and maximal fixed points and thus natively provides algorithms to synthesize controllers with respect to invariance and reachability specifications. The atomic propositions, which are used to formulate the specifications, are allowed to be defined in terms of finite unions and intersections of polytopes as well as ellipsoids. While the main computations are done in C++, the tool contains a Matlab interface to simulate the closed loop system and to visualize the abstract state space together with the atomic propositions. We illustrate the performance of the tool with two examples from the literature. The tool and all conducted experiments are available at www.hcs.ei.tum.de.