Programming behaviour of a personal service robot with application to healthcare

Abstract

We propose an approach for developing applications on a personal healthcare service robot. We have developed a model of representing robot behaviour through a domain specific language (DSL) and enabling authoring through a Visual Programming Environment (VPE), RoboStudio. RoboStudio is to be used by robot designers, developers and domain experts for developing social robotics behaviour in a healthcare environment. The method for authoring is visual in order to convey the robot's decision logic and interaction behaviour in a more intuitive manner while retaining expressiveness. In the paper, we discuss current progress we have made in raising the level of abstraction in service application development. This will help the robotics community to make significant investment in developing programming infrastructures, better programming language support and enhancing existing programming languages through simpler syntax and expressive semantics. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.