Representing actions with Kernels

Abstract

Most of today's robotic task descriptions are designed for a single software and hardware platform and thus can not be reused without modifications. This work follows the meta-model approach of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) to introduce the concepts of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and of Model Transformations to the domain of hybrid force-velocity controlled robot tasks, as expressed in (i) the Task Frame formalism (TFF), and (ii) a Statechart model representing the discrete coordination between TFF tasks. The result is a representation in MDE's M0, M1, M2 and M3 form, with increasingly robot and software independent representations, that do remain instantaneously executable, except obviously for the M3 metametamodel. The Platform Specific Model information can be added in three steps: (i) the type of the hybrid force-velocity controlled task, (ii) the hardware properties of the robot, tool and sensor, and (iii) the software properties of the applied execution framework. We demonstrate the presented approach by means of an alignment task executed on a Willow Garage PR2 and a KUKA Light Weight Robot (LWR) arm.