Translating Structured English to Robot Controllers

Abstract

Recently, Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) has been successfully applied to high-level task and motion planning problems for mobile robots. One of the main attributes of LTL is its close relationship with fragments of natural language. In this paper, we take the first steps toward building a natural language interface for LTL planning methods with mobile robots as the application domain. For this purpose, we built a structured English language which maps directly to a fragment of LTL.

High-level control of modular robots

“…Recent work in high-level control of mobile robots has sought to automatically generate controllers from instructions that are more intuitive for humans. Temporal logic (in work such as [21,19,7,18,33]) or structured language (as in [20]) are used to define high-level task specifications. These approaches, in brief, convert a real-life robotics problem into a hybrid system consisting of multiple layers of abstraction.…”

“…This approach (along with [8]) builds on the work in [21,20], using the high-level control framework in [11]. Here a task specification is parsed into structured English constructed around a subset of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) ( [10]).…”

“…"Always not dangerRegion) and non-projective locative prepositions such as "between", "within distance of", and more. The details of this grammar are discussed in [20,22].…”

High-level control of modular robots

“…Specifications involving location and sensing of the environment, actuators and traits are then synthesized into provably correct control of modular robots. The robot and its environment are described using binary prepositions in the structured English grammar described in [20,22]. The grammar consists of the following items:…”

“…The problem outlined in Section 2.3 extends the work in [21,20,11], where high-level control of a non-reconfigurable mobile robot is performed through the following:…”