The Mobile Robot Programming Lab and the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute both focus on the interaction between humans and robots for the sake of education. This paper describes two specific endeavors that are representative of the work we do in robot education and human-robot interaction. The first section describes the Mobile Robot Programming Lab curriculum desig...

The primary advantage of visual programming languages is that they directly represent the structure of algorithms and data, thereby enhancing the programmer's ability to build and comprehend programs. If the programming domain consists of physical objects with observable behaviour, such as a robot and its environment , then incorporating the obvious visual representations of these objects direc...

The implementation of high-performance robot controllers for complex control tasks such as playing autonomous robot soccer is tedious, errorprone, and a never ending programming task. In this paper we propose programmers to write autonomous controllers that optimize and automatically adapt themselves to changing circumstances of task execution using explicit perception, dynamics and action mode...

The Robotics Research Group of the University of Auckland is developing a robot programming environment using a Service Based Architecture [Woo, 2002; Woo et al., 2003] to facilitate the description of robot behaviours. Simulation and visualisation tools allow programmers to test their robot behaviours at early stages and such tools are an important addition to any programming environment. This...

For certain mass-marked robot applications it is essential to have cheap, efficient and reliable methods of sensormotor code generation, hand-programming is not a viable option in such cases. We present a new method to program mobile robots — “code identification by demonstration” — which algorithmically transfers human behaviours directly to robot control code, using transparent mathematical f...

Development of software that determines the behavior of robots is typically done in a language that is far from dynamic. Programs are written, compiled, and then deployed on a simulator, or the robot, for testing. This long development cycle causes a cognitive dissociation between writing the code for the robot and observing the robot in action. As a result, writing robot behaviors is much more...

Programming robots is a complicated and time-consuming task. A robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system. Often, control and communication paths within the system are tightly coupled to the actual physical configuration of the robot. Thus, programming a robot can hardly be achieved by experts of the domain in which the robot is used. In this paper we present an approach towa...

One of the main obstacles to automating production is the time needed to program the robot. Decreasing the programming time would increase the appeal of automation in many industries. In this paper we analyze the performance of a Predictive Robot Programming (PRP) system on complex, real-world robotic tasks. The PRP system attempts to decrease programming time by predicting the waypoints of a r...

The complexity of robot software systems calls for the use of some well-conceived architecture together with programming tools that support the architecture. These sets of tools are usually named robot programming frameworks. One common feature of robot architectures is the modular decomposition of systems into simpler and largely independent components. These components implement primitive act...