ALFA: a language for programming reactive robotic control systems

The author introduces ALFA, a language for programming reactive control mechanisms for autonomous mobile robots. ALFA programs consist of networks of computational modules connected by communications channels. These channels are themselves computational entities which perform mediation tasks. This makes it possible to design modular behaviors which may be inserted and removed without having to restructure the interconnections among modules and allows the system to interface cleanly with higher-level reasoning processes. ALFA supports a dataflow computation model as well as a state-machine model. The results of two experiments using ALFA to control real robots are briefly discussed