Programming of Intelligent Service Robots with the Process Model “FRIEND::Process” and Configurable Task-Knowledge

In Alex Proyas’s science fiction movie “I, Robot” (2004) a detective suspects a robot as murderer. This robot is a representative of a new generation of personal assistants that help and entertain people during daily life activities. In opposition to the public opinion the detective proclaimed that the robot is able to follow his own will and is not forced to Isaac Asimov’s three main rules of robotics (Asimov, 1991). In the end this assumption turned out to be the truth. Even though the technological part of this story is still far beyond realization, the idea of a personal robotic assistant is still requested. Experts predicted robotic solutions to be ready to break through in domestic and other non-industrial domains (Engelberger, 1989) within the next years. But up to now, only rather simple robotic assistants like lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners are available on the market. As stated in (Gräfe & Bischoff, 2003), all these systems have in common that they only show traces of intelligence and are specialists, designed for mostly a particular task. Robots being able to solve more complex tasks have not yet left the prototypical status. This is due to the large number of scientific and technical challenges that have to be coped with in the domain of robots acting and interacting in human environments (Kemp et al., 2007). The focus of this paper is to describe a tool based process model, called the “FRIEND::Process”1, which supports the development of intelligent robots in the domain of personal assistants. The paper concentrates on the interaction and close relation between the FRIEND::Process and configurable task-knowledge, the so called process-structures. Process-structures are embedded in different layers of abstraction within the layered control architecture MASSiVE2 (Martens et al., 2007). Even though the usage of layered control architectures for service robots is not a novel idea and has been proposed earlier (Schlegel &