A formal model of computation for sensory-based robotics

It is noted that almost all attempts to construct special-purpose robot programming languages have proceeded by taking a computer-programming language and adding some special primitives. Here, the authors have taken the approach of trying to define computation at its most primitive level in terms of the characteristics of the robot domain. They construct a special model of computation, called RS (robot schemas), with properties designed to facilitate sensory-based robot programming. This approach offers the potential to construct robot task representations which are easy to use and concise, and which execute in an efficient manner. The authors define the model formally using port automata. These definitions ensure consistency and well-definedness, and the facilitate plan verification and automatic plan generation