  Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward
functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot.
Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics
for relatively simple tasks. Real world applications typically involve more
complex tasks with rich temporal and logical structure. In this paper we take
advantage of the expressive power of temporal logic (TL) to specify complex
rules the robot should follow, and incorporate domain knowledge into learning.
We propose Truncated Linear Temporal Logic (TLTL) as specifications language,
that is arguably well suited for the robotics applications, together with
quantitative semantics, i.e., robustness degree. We propose a RL approach to
learn tasks expressed as TLTL formulae that uses their associated robustness
degree as reward functions, instead of the manually crafted heuristics trying
to capture the same specifications. We show in simulated trials that learning
is faster and policies obtained using the proposed approach outperform the ones
learned using heuristic rewards in terms of the robustness degree, i.e., how
well the tasks are satisfied. Furthermore, we demonstrate the proposed RL
approach in a toast-placing task learned by a Baxter robot.
