Building a hierarchical robot task from multiple task procedures

To make better use of a service robot, which interacts with users during the task performance in everyday life, developers and/or users may frequently want to change action sequences so that a robot behaves in a natural manner. Emphasizing the procedural aspects of human task knowledge, we propose a method to generate a FSM-based robot task model from task procedures in possible scenarios. Proposed method consists of description of task procedures, conceptual definition of actions and states, and transformation from task procedures to a robot task language based on hierarchical finite-state machine. A simple illustrative example was described to show the application of the method.