Behavior-based manipulator programming based on Extensible Agent Behavior Specification Language

Abstract

Endowing a robot with skills to perform manipulative tasks has an important role in developing an intelligent robot. To manipulate objects, a robot needs perception and action skills. However, designing the programming framework to integrate a variety of skills in a robot system is a challenging task and significantly influences the robot performance. In this paper, we present a behavior-based manipulator programming framework which is based on Extensible Agent Behavior Specification Language (XABSL) to manage behaviors in a robot system. To achieve the flexibility and reusability of robot behaviors required for practice applications, the proposed concept is to implement a programming framework for robot manipulation into two steps: first, perception and action behaviors are created to endow a robot with fundamental skills to perform manipulative tasks; second, using the XABSL framework, the created behaviors are simply planned by an option graph. Because behaviors are planned to be activated by certain stimuli and respond accordingly, programming robot manipulative tasks becomes simpler. Moreover, by the programming framework for robot manipulative tasks, the programming effort is reduced considerably. In our experiments, we provide an extensive validation of the proposed behavior-based programming framework on the manipulative tasks such as stacking cubes and solving rubik's cube.