Translating Cooperative Strategies for Robot Behavior

This paper presents a method for engineering and programming multirobot systems, based on a combination of statecharts and hybrid automata, which are well-known in the fields of software engineering and artificial intelligence. This formal specification method allows graphical presentation of the whole multiagent system behavior. In addition, these specifications can be directly executed on mobile robots. We describe the transformation process from the specification to executable code, after introducing the necessary definitions. A translator that automatically converts hybrid hierarchical statecharts into simple flat hybrid automata (i.e. without hierarchies) has been implemented. The respective tool allows the text-based input of hybrid hierarchical automata specifications of multiagent system with synchronization. The translation into flat automata is performed by means of different plug-ins, leading e.g. to executable code for Sony Aibo robot dogs. The plug-in just mentioned has been successfully applied in the RoboCup four-legged league.