Reactive behavior design tools

Abstract

The reactive behavior of an autonomous agent can be described as collections of logical behaviors, each member of the collection controlling some aspect of the agent and working in conjunction with all the other behaviors. Such collections of reactive behaviors can be defined as combined, synchronous finite-state automata, using real-time programming languages which have strong formal components. These language tools, such as COSPAN and ESTEREL, require sophisticated users who have deep knowledge of both the syntax and semantics of the language. The authors use the simplicity of graphical finite-state automata editing to specify concurrent synchronous finite-state automata, and from those they produce COSPAN descriptions of these behaviors for analysis, and C language programs to implement the designed behaviors. The usefulness and validity of this approach was confirmed by the design, verification and implementation of several examples, including a controller demon for a robot arm.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>