Linguistic Control of Mobile Robots

(c) 2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/IROS.2001.976279In this paper we study the interactions between symbolic computer programs and mechanical devises, e.g. mobile robots. We show that by using motion description languages for generating continuous motions from symbolic input strings, this interaction between the continuous and the discrete can be given a meaningful control theoretic interpretation. We furthermore illustrate how robot behaviors can be learned within this framework. We also investigate how to choose the motion description languages in order to minimize the lengths of the inputs to the robots