A New Perspective on Usability Applied to Robotics

For many service robots, reactivity to changes in their surroundings is a must. However, developing software suitable for dynamic environments is difficult. Existing robotic middleware allows engineers to design behavior graphs by organizing communication between components. But because these graphs are structurally inflexible, they hardly support the development of complex reactive behavior. To address this limitation, we propose Playful, a software platform that applies reactive programming to the specification of robotic behavior. The front-end of Playful is a scripting language which is simple (only five keywords), yet results in the runtime coordinated activation and deactivation of an arbitrary number of higher-level sensory-motor couplings. When using Playful, developers describe actions of various levels of abstraction via behaviors trees. During runtime an underlying engine applies a mixture of logical constructs to obtain the desired behavior. These constructs include conditional ruling, dynamic prioritization based on resources management and finite state machines. Playful has been successfully used to program an upper-torso humanoid manipulator to perform lively interaction with any human approaching it.