A social robot empowered with a new programming language and its performance in a laboratory

Abstract

For the last years, social robots have been used to serve as tour-guide robots in museums, laboratories, trade fairs, etc. So they are intended to perform tasks which will be affected by the interaction with people. In order to perform these tasks, a task planner must be developed in order to integrate the several modules that the robot contains in its software architecture. In this paper a new programming language was developed in order to command the actions of the robot over the place where the social robot is going to perform its actions. Lexical, syntactical and semantical analyzers were developed based on a simple language syntax with the possibility to create events. These events can come from different sensors installed like the RFID, cameras, etc. The testbed is Doris, an interactive robot developed in the Centre of Automation and Robotics. The results show that the new language can merge all the modules from Doris, executing the actions (trajectories, speeches and actions based on events) specified in the program provided by the developer without making any changes in the lower layers of the framework.