Disturbance Rejection Control under Nested Signal Temporal Logic Specifications: A Recursive Design Approach

Abstract

For the control synthesis problem under signal temporal logic (STL) specifications, control barrier functions (CBFs) serve as an effective method. However, traditional CBF approaches are severely restricted in expressiveness, particularly failing to encode nested formulas containing multiple temporal operators. While recent methods based on reachability analysis attempt to address this, they incur a heavy computational burden and rely strictly on known system dynamics. To overcome this challenge, this paper investigates a CBF-based recursive control scheme for nested STL specifications under uncertain disturbances. Within this scheme, we introduce a novel recursive CBF design procedure guided by a modified STL tree (sTLT) to yield explicit, parameterized CBFs without heavy computational demands. To render the proposed recursive CBF design applicable to systems subject to uncertain disturbances, we further integrate a novel reconstructed CBF-based quadratic programming (QP) controller. This controller requires no prior knowledge of the disturbances while relaxing initial safety assumptions. The proposed recursive control synthesis framework is proven to effectively encode nested STL specifications while ensuring that the system satisfies the specifications under unknown disturbances, as supported by simulation results.