A semiotic approach to the control of semi-autonomous robots

This paper describes the application of basis concepts in semiotics and nonsmooth systems to robot control. The resulting framework yields a vocabulary of movements tailored to the control of semi-autonomous robots. Semiotics provides a set of classes of objects to model the interactions among humans. The paper proposes the use of these semiotic objects to model human–robot interactions, accounting for features such as semantics and ambiguity. Mathematical models for the objects are presented including objects to generate paths for the robot to follow and operators to act on such objects. Experiments with single and multiple robots illustrating the main aspects of the proposed framework are presented.