the Fourth International Cognitive Robotics

Behavior-based robot programs are designedby splitting the overall robot decision making processamong concurrent processes, each of them being incharge of a well defined simple goal-oriented behavior.However, the combination of simple behaviors into morecomplex ones often incur global interactions that cannotbe debugged by just considering individual behaviors.The normal way of dealing with global interactions thatmay cause failure in the robot execution is to programadditional heuristic processes that monitor behaviors tocheck that they progress normally towards their intendedgoals. In this paper, we explain how Linear TemporalLogic (LTL) can be used as a declarative language forspecifying an interesting class of such monitoringprocesses. This simplifies the task of writing robotcontrol programs, increases the design modularity byclearly separating the control components from themonitoring ones, and augments the reliability of controlprograms thanks to a precise and clear LTL semantics.