Linguistic control of mobile robots

Abstract

We study the interactions between symbolic computer programs and mechanical devices, e.g. mobile robots. We show that by using motion description languages for generating continuous motions from symbolic input strings, this interaction between the continuous and the discrete can be given a meaningful control theoretic interpretation. We furthermore illustrate how robot behaviors can be learned within this framework. We also investigate how to choose the motion description languages in order to minimize the lengths of the inputs to the robots.