Specifying Robot Reactivity in Procedural Languages

A key part of programming a robotic system is specifying the responses to events that the robot may encounter. Existing methods of programming responses include event loops, reactive languages and hybrid architectures, none of which meet the specific needs of mobile robot programming. This work presents a design for new semantics for specifying reactivity in mobile robot programs, one that allows for effective specification of reactive behaviour within procedural robot programs. An initial evaluation version is implemented in Python. Events and responses are supported as program objects, and are connected together by new statements. Programmers specify connections between events and responses anywhere within the program code, so connections can easily be changed in response to changes in program and robot state