A task description language for robot control

Robot systems must achieve high level goals while remaining reactive to contingencies and new opportunities. This typically requires robot systems to coordinate concurrent activities, monitor the environment, and deal with exceptions. We have developed a new language to support such task-level control. The language, TDL, is an extension of C++ that provides syntactic support for task decomposition, synchronization, execution monitoring, and exception handling. A compiler transforms TDL into pure C++ code that utilizes a platform-independent task management library. This paper introduces TDL, describes the task tree representation that underlies the language, and presents some aspects of its implementation and use in an autonomous mobile robot.

Authors

• Reid G. Simmons
• David Apfelbaum

Keywords

• Robot control
• Robot kinematics
• Monitoring
• Communication system control
• Libraries
• Mobile robots
• Robot sensing systems
• Resource management
• Actuators
• Switches
• Robotic System
• Mobile Robot
• Automated Guided Vehicles
• Error Handling
• Transition State
• Control Programs
• Smooth Function
• Simple Example
• Tree Nodes
• Node Status
• Debugging
• Child Nodes
• Types Of Nodes
• Control Architecture
• Sequential Execution
• Task Definition
• C++ Code