Kurt Konolige. COLBERT: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In KI - Kunstliche Intelligenz, pages 31{ 52, 1997.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....with the representations needed by an intelligent device or agent, the script which makes up the recipe body is designed to be extremely similar to the scripts that are actually used to control mobile robots. It is based loosely on the ACT formalism, which is now included as part of the COLBERT [Kon97] scripting language in Saphira, a software package distributed by ActivMedia Robotics with its mobile robots. While, at rst, actually using one of these languages seemed tempting, I chose instead to write my own script interpreter and language to better pursue the goal of 42 making the script ....

Kurt Konolige. COLBERT: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In KI - Kunstliche Intelligenz, pages 31{ 52, 1997.

....of sensor based control algorithms. However, unpredictability implies that any such algorithm might be interrupted at any time, or may suddenly be faced with inputs that are inconsistent or incomprehensible with the current control context. Methods such as prioritization of control [2] or monitors [15] have been used in the past to deal with such issues. Ideally, a good robot programming language should provide a simple, clean set of abstractions for describing and combining control behaviors. A second set of issues arises from the nature of the tasks that autonomous robots would (ideally) ....

....are languages that have been motivated by the needs of AI planning or, more generally, high level goal based specification of behavior, e.g. RPL or PRS. In this review, we will generally focus to a variety of intermediate level languages have emerged in recent years, e.g. TDL [24] or Colbert [15]. These languages attempt to strike a compromise, offering the ability to program low level behavior in some detail, while at the same time providing language abstractions that facilitate the description of higher level system behavior. Although our review is focussed on these systems, we also ....

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Kurt Konolige. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. Technical report, SRI Interna- tional, June 1997.

....structured, modular way. As example in this paper, we will consider the robotic soccer domain, see also [24, 31] which present predecessor work towards a formal logic based approach for agents engineering. 1 State Machines State machines are ubiquitous in computer science and robotics (see e.g. [4, 15, 25]) because they provide a way to define a mapping between the internal state of an agent and its operation in the world. They give us a set of concepts that can be used for modeling behavior through finite state transition systems. They can be used to model the behavior of individual entities as ....

....models, improving the definition in [27] Last but not least, the very recent paper [16] states another interesting approach for defining a semantics for statecharts, namely based on graph transformations. Many languages for controlling a robot, make use of finite state automata, e.g. Colbert [15]. Finite state automata can be viewed as a special case of the state machines considered here, where a notion of concurrency is present in addition. Implementations of agents relying on the subsumption architecture [3, 4] also follow the idea, that (robot) agents can be described by (finite) state ....

K. Konolige. COLBERT: A language for reactive control in Sapphira. In G. Brewka, C. Habel, and B. Nebel, editors, KI-97: Advances in Artificial Intelligence -- Proceedings of the 21st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 1303, pages 31--52, Freiburg, 1997. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York.

.... the development of robot programming systems has been an area of active research in robotics (see [2] for a recent collection of articles in this area) Many of these languages are realized by defining data structures and certain specialized library routines to existing languages (notably C [6, 5, 10, 16], Lisp [1] Pascal [11] and Basic [15] In particular, most of these languages include special functions or commands that operate in the time domain. For example, VAL includes a command to move the robot to a given spatial location. This command operates asynchronously and has, thereby, the ....

K. Konolige. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In G. Brewka, C. Habel, and B. Nebel, editors, Advances in Artificial Intelligence, volume 1303 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 1997.

....especially true f or plans with concurrent actions, which arise naturally in robotics applications. Moreover, simulations are in general much faster than actually running tests on the robot. There have been a number of proposals for high level control languages such as RPL [18] RAP [6] COLBERT [12], and GOLOG [15] Among them only RPL and GOLOG allow for plan projection. RPL s projection mechanism called XFRM [18,19] is problematic, however, because projections rely on using RPL s runtime system, which lacks a for mal semantics and which makes predictions implementation dependent. On the ....

....policies turns out to be very helpful when it comes to specifying robust robot plans. As mentioned earlier, the concept of an instruction whose effect is to wait until a condition becomes true is common in special non logic based robot programming languages such as RPL [18] RAP [6] or COLBERT [12] (the same is true for the concepts of concurrency and priorities) We believe that this is due to the fact that in r eal robot applications it is typical that the r obot is to execute a primary task, like the mail delivery in our example,and at the same time has to monitor and reac t to ....

Konolige, K. 1997. Colber t: A language for reac tive control in sapphira. In KI'97,volume 1303 of LNAI.

....well founded projection mechanism. Introduction High level robot controllers typically specify processes which operate concurrently and change the world in a continuous fashion over time. Several special programming languages such as rpl (McDermott 1992) 1 rap (Firby 1987) or colbert (Konolige 1997) have been developed for this purpose. As an example, consider the following rpl program: WITH POLICY WHENEVER Batt Level 46 CHARGE BATTERIES WITH POLICY WHENEVER NEAR DOOR(RmA 118) SAY( hello ) DELIVER MAIL Figure 1: Oce delivery plan Roughly, the robot s main task is to deliver mail, ....

Konolige, K. 1997. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In KI'97, volume 1303 of LNAI.

....and plan interchangeably, following McDermott (McDermott 1992) who takes plans to be programs whose execution can be reasoned about by the agent who executes the program. There have been a number of proposals for high level control languages such as RPL (McDermott 1992) RAP (Firby 1987) COLBERT (Konolige 1997), and GOLOG (Levesque et al. 1997) Among them only RPL and GOLOG allow for plan projection. RPL s projection mechanism called XFRM (McDermott 1992; 1994) is problematic, however, because projections rely on using RPL s run time system, which lacks a formal semantics and which makes predictions ....

....to be very helpful when it comes to specifying robust robot plans. As mentioned earlier, the concept of an instruction whose effect is to wait until a condition becomes true is common in special non logic based robot programming languages such as RPL (McDermott 1992) RAP (Firby 1987) or COLBERT (Konolige 1997) (the same is true for the concepts of concurrency and priorities) We believe that this is due to the fact that in real robot applications it is typical that the robot is to execute a primary task, like the mail delivery in our example, and at the same time has to monitor and react to ....

Konolige, K. 1997. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In KI'97, volume 1303 of LNAI.

....well founded projection mechanism. Introduction High level robot controllers typically specify processes which operate concurrently and change the world in a continuous fashion over time. Several special programming languages such as RPL (McDermott 1992) 1 RAP (Firby 1987) or COLBERT (Konolige 1997) have been developed for this purpose. As an example, consider the following RPL program: WITH POLICY WHENEVER Batt Level 46 CHARGE BATTERIES WITH POLICY WHENEVER NEAR DOOR(RmA 118) SAY( hello ) DELIVER MAIL Figure 1: Office delivery plan Roughly, the robot s main task is to deliver mail, ....

Konolige, K. 1997. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In KI'97, volume 1303 of LNAI.

....robot programming languages addressing a particular level of the hybrid architecture hierarchy include threading capabilities. The L language [9] focuses on the development of behavior based controllers and supports LISP based multithreaded programming for embedded systems. The Colbert language [10] targets programs specifying the scheduling and control of tasks and behaviors at the bottom layer of a hybrid architecture. Colbert emphasizes the underlying finite state automata semantics and the C like interactive development and debugging. Commercial mobile platforms favor an easy start for ....

Konolige K., "COLBERT: A Language for Reactive Control in Sapphira", Technical Report, SRI International, June 1997.

....development at each of these levels. For example, low level behaviors (usually specified using differential or difference equations or dataflow diagrams) are easily implemented using tools like Simulink TM and the RealTimeWorkshop TM : Likewise, robot programming environments such as Colbert [13] or RCCL [9] embedded within imperative languages like C or C , are generally targeted at mid level programming. Finally, a variety of architectures have been proposed to handle task level integration of software modules [4] In short, most robot programming systems tend to capture one domain ....

K. Konolige. Colbert: A language for reactive control in sapphira. In G. Brewka, C. Habel, and B. Nebel, editors, Advances in Artificial Intelligence, volume 1303 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 1997.

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