Fuzzy representations and control for domestic service robots in Golog

Abstract

In the RoboCup@Home domestic service robot competition, complex tasks such as "get the cup from the kitchen and bring it to the living room" or "find me this and that object in the apartment" have to be accomplished. At these competitions the robots may only be instructed by natural language. As humans use qualitative concepts such as "near" or "far", the robot needs to cope with them, too. For our domestic robot, we use the robot programming and plan language Readylog, our variant of Golog. In previous work we extended the action language Golog, which was developed for the high-level control of agents and robots, with fuzzy concepts and showed how to embed fuzzy controllers in Golog. In this paper, we demonstrate how these notions can be fruitfully applied to two domestic service robotic scenarios. In the first application, we demonstrate how qualitative fluents based on a fuzzy set semantics can be deployed. In the second program, we show an example of a fuzzy controller for a follow-a-person task. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.