Abstract
Programming sophisticated robots such as service robots or humanoids is still a complex endeavor. Although programming robotic applications requires specialist knowledge, a robot software environment should support convenient development while maintaining full flexibility needed when realizing challenging robotics tasks. In addition, several desirable properties should be fulfilled, such as robustness, reusability of existing programs, and skill transfer between robots. In this work, we introduce the ArmarX statechart concept, which is used for describing control and data flow of robot programs. This event-driven statechart approach of ArmarX helps realizing important features such as increased robustness through distributed program execution, convenient programming through graphical user interfaces, and versatility by interweaving dynamic statechart structure with custom user-code. We show that using hierarchical and distributed statecharts increases reusability, allows skill transfer between robots, and hides complexity in robot programming by splitting robot behavior into control flow and functionality.
Highlights
Programing complex robots like humanoids is challenging and is often divided into at least two domains
We focus on high-level robot programing and discuss how using hierarchical, distributed statecharts for encoding robot skills aid in achieving convenient programing and reusable, transferable robot behaviors
Runtime-reconfigurability means that a statechart can be defined in configuration files, and that the statechart structure can be changed completely at runtime
Summary
Programing complex robots like humanoids is challenging and is often divided into at least two domains. High-level robot programing copes with perception, task and motion planning, user interaction, memory concepts, and reusability of robot skills. Well-designed robot software frameworks should support the development of complex robot programs on all system levels. A framework needs to provide welldefined interfaces for all available robot components and the flexibility to implement application- or task-specific behaviors. A basic set of robot skills (i.e., robot programs for a special behavior) should be available, which can be used to assemble more complex robot programs. One challenge in building a robot framework is to provide means for doing this in a robust and convenient way
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