A Logical Approach to Portable High-level Robot Programming

The vast majority of mobile robotic systems have been designed to solve “one off”, unique problems, with specialized sensors, robot hardware and computation; and porting robotics software from one platform to another has always been a thorny problem. In this paper, we show how by choosing an appropriate level of abstraction, one can write hardware-independent controllers for robots that perform complex navigation and reasoning tasks. The approach is based on a logical framework that integrates reasoning, perception, and action. We also describe steps we have taken towards specifying a general interface through which our high-level programs can interact with a variety of robotic platforms. As an example, we discuss a mail delivery program that runs on both an RWI B21 and a Nomad200 system.