From high to low level and vice-versa: a new language for the translation between abstraction levels in robot control architectures

Abstract

The use of Planning, Execution and Monitoring architectures to control robotic platforms is becoming very popular. In most cases these architectures provide knowledge at two different levels of abstraction: high-level (deliberative planning), and low-level (robot sensing and reactive behaviours). Therefore, the translation between these two levels of abstraction is required to solve real use cases. Typically such translations are written in the source code by experts who know the software. Furthermore, if these translations or the robotic platform change, it is required to resort such experts again for editing the source code to incorporate all these changes and, in the worst case, to recompile the entire software architecture. It would be useful if such translations could be defined in a declarative way, so that they can be easily edited (even by non-experts) and without modifying the modules of the control architecture, which should be able to process such formal description. For this reason, we contribute with a language for the description of translations from High to Low and from Low to High abstraction levels when designing robotic planning tasks.