User-Friendly Robot Environment for Creation of Social Scenarios - Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation - page 213

Scenarios need to be easily adapted for user tests and rapid prototyping, and
should allow for an incremental approach of scenario development. A graphical
language will be used to realize these requirements. We use TiViPE to construct
a robot architecture since it naturally can incorporate most of the aspects de-
scribed in this section. In addition a substantial set of modules for sensory data
processing is available within TiVIPE.
Section 2 describes a robot framework where a textual robot language is con-
structed with no more then 4 different control characters and 14 commands.
This language provides full control over an advanced humanoid robot. Section 3
provides the robot sensory part. Most advanced robots provide audio and video
data together with a set of values providing information about individual sensors.
The following section describes how robot commands can be generated using and
describe how the concept of using states is implemented using graphical compo-
nents. Section 4 describes the work from the perspective of a user, gaining easy
access to controlling a robot, without the need to have a background in robotics
or software development. The paper ends with a summary and future work.

2 Robot Software Framework

The robot software framework includes the commands that interface with the
robot, the language that insures non-conflicting operation of these commands
by parallel actions of the robot and by multiple and conflicting action possibili-
ties, and the visual programming environment that allows easy construction and
visualization of the action stream.

2.1 Textual Language

A textual robot language insures that neither in depth knowledge of a robot
hardware is required, nor the behavior designer is confined to a specific robot.
A minimalistic language, such that the robot commands can be executed in a
serial or parallel manner is the best choice. Therefore we choose for a language
structure that resembles adding and multiplying of symbols, where the symbols
are equivalent to behavioral primitives:

( a + b ) ∗ c + d ∗ e (1)

Knowing that brackets bind stronger than multiplication, and multiplication has
higher priority over addition, we can construct a powerful language that is in
essence identical to the following statement from the formal logic:

[ a | b ]& c | d & e (2)

In terms of robots commands, a b denotes that a and b are executed in parallel,

d & e denotes that d and e are executed subsequently, first d then e, the square
brackets denote the binding order of execution. Commands a, b, c, d, and e are

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