Interacting with a Robot Ecology using Task Templates

Robot ecologies provide a new paradigm for assistive, service, industrial, and entertainment robotics which is quickly gaining popularity. These ecologies contain a large number of robotic components pervasively embedded in the environment and interacting with each other. Human users of such systems need to be able to interface with both the system as a w hole and, if desired, which each individual component. The humans should be able to transmit, in a natural way, commands that range from basic ones, such as "turn on the lights in the bedroom", to abstract ones, such as "bring me a cup of coffee". Human users may also need to interact with task execution, especially at decision points. In this paper, we introduce an approach to interface a human user to a specific type of robot ecology, called an ecology of Physically Embedded Intelligent Systems, or PEIS-Ecology. The ecology includes simple sensors and actuators and more complicated devices such as mobile robots. The proposed interface satisfies two requirements: 1) to easily and automatically generate component interfaces, and 2) to provide a simple mechanism by which to request and monitor the execution of tasks in the ecology.