Formalizing the specifications of a domain-specific language for authoring behaviour of personal service robots

Abstract

Programming tasks on interactive personal service robots is challenging. Until various component technologies for fully autonomous systems are matured for field deployment, robots need to be tasked and programmed by humans. This research aims at developing a higher layer of abstraction for programming personal service robots with applications to healthcare scenarios. The robots were used in a real world deployment scenario at an Aged Care Facility. The goal is to enable roboticists and non-programmer domain experts to co-develop robot service scenarios in real world environments and simulate execution of the behaviour without running the entire application on the robot. A domain-specific programming language (DSL) and a visual programming environment (Ro-boStudio) were developed to meet this goal. The key objective of this paper is to formalize the language specification for the DSL. It is referred to as Robot Behaviour Description Modeling Language (RBDML). The graphical meta-model for RBDML consists of two interwoven modelling languages. This formalisation allows the key concepts of the domain to be captured in a formal meta-model and keep it independent from the target language. Examples presented will give the reader a walk-through of the language definition process along with the modeling notations, syntax, semantics and validation rules. The results demonstrate the accuracy of code-generation compared with hand written code for equivalent robot service applications.