Developing software for mobile robot applications is a tedious and error-prone task. Modern mobile robot systems are distributed systems and their designs exhibit large heterogeneity in terms of hardware, operating systems, communications protocols, and programming languages. Vendor-provided programming environments have not kept pace with recent developments in software technology. Also, stand...

Many tasks for autonomous agents or robots are best described by a specification of the environment and a specification of the available actions the agent or robot can perform. Combining such a specification with the possibility to imperatively program a robot or agent is what we call the actionbased imperative programming. One of the most successful such approaches is Golog. In this paper, we ...

In this paper, we make a comparative review of a variety of \intermediate-level" robot languages that have emerged in recent years. We also describe a robot programming language called FROB (for Functional ROBotics). FROB is an example of an embedded, domain-speci c language, hosted by the Haskell programming language. We present the basic concepts of the language, discuss the ability of FROB t...

The mobile service robots will share their workspaces e.g. offices, hospitals or households with humans. Thus a direct contact between man and machine is inevitably. Robots equipped with appropriate sensors can sense the touch. In this paper we present how an untrained user can intuitively interact with the new DLR light-weight robot just by touching the arm. The robot with 7 dof’s will react b...

At the undergraduate level there is a need to expose students to the complexities of programming robots to accomplish real life tasks. This paper outlines how a course in robotics can be taught at the undergraduate level with specific experiments that allow for incremental learning in programming a mobile robot. The experiments can be conducted using either a commercially available robot or by ...

Constraints play a central role in the analysis and planning of robot motion. We suggest that constraints form an appropriate language with which to program robot motion as well and describe the Least Constraint framework.