Toward a Vocabulary of Primitive Task Programs for Humanoid Robots

Abstract

Researchers and engineers have used primitive actions to facilitate programming of tasks since the days of Shakey [1]. Task-level programming, which requires the user to specify only subgoals of a task to be accomplished, depends on such a set of primitive task programs to perform these subgoals. Past research in this area has used the commands from robot programming languages as the vocabulary of primitive tasks for robotic manipulators. We propose drawing from work measurement systems to construct the vocabulary of primitive task programs. We describe one such work measurement system, present several primitive task programs for humanoid robots inspired from this system, and show how these primitive programs can be used to construct complex behaviors.