Structured Reactive Communication Plans - Integrating Conversational Actions into High-Level Robot Control Systems

Specifying communication routines transparently and explicitly as part of robots’ plans rather than hiding them in separate modules makes robots’ communication behavior more effective, efficient, and robust. It enables robot control systems to generate, reason about and revise their communication behavior. The controllers can also synchronize the robots’ conversations with other actions and use control structures to make the communication behavior flexible and robust. In this paper, we extend RPL, a reactive plan language, to allow for controlling conversational actions. The additional constructs constitute an interface between RPL and conversational actions that is identical to the interface between RPL and continuous control processes such as navigation. The uniformity of the two interfaces and the control structures provided by RPL enable a programmer to concisely specify a wide spectrum of communication behavior. This paper describes how these extensions are implemented and used by a robot office courier.