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Towards Intuitive Robot Programming Using Finite State Automata

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KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11793))

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to intuitive robot programming, with the aim of enabling non-experts to generate sensor-based, structured programs. The core idea is to generate a variant of a finite state automaton (representing the program) by kinesthetic programming (physically guiding the robot). We use the structure of the automaton for control flow (loops and branching according to conditions of the environment). For programming, we forgo a visual user interface completely to determine to what extent this is viable. Our experiments show that non-expert users are indeed able to successfully program small sample tasks within reasonable time.

This work has partly been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant agreement He2696/15 INTROP. We acknowledge Katharina Barth, who developed a preliminary version of the presented work and code base upon which we could build.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that looping back is not the only way to reach a branching state for adding new branches. The system can also be programmed up to a terminal state, then executed from the beginning, until reaching the branching state again, as detailed below.

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Correspondence to Lukas Sauer .

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Sauer, L., Henrich, D., Martens, W. (2019). Towards Intuitive Robot Programming Using Finite State Automata. In: Benzmüller, C., Stuckenschmidt, H. (eds) KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30179-8_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30179-8_25

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