Languages for specifying missions of robotic applications

Book chapter, 2021

Robot application development is gaining increasing attention both from the research and industry communities. Robots are complex cyber-physical and safety-critical systems with various dimensions of heterogeneity and variability. They often integrate modules conceived by developers with different backgrounds. Programming robotic applications typically requires programming and mathematical or robotic expertise from end-users. In the near future, multipurpose robots will be used in the tasks of everyday life in environments such as our houses, hotels, airports or museums. It would then be necessary to democratize the specification of missions that robots should accomplish. In other words, the specification of missions of robotic applications should be performed via easy-to-use and accessible ways, and, at the same time, the specification should be accurate, unambiguous, and precise. This chapter presents domain-specific languages (DSLs) for robot mission specification, among others, profiling them as internal or external and also giving an overview of their tooling support. The types of robots supported by the respective languages and tools are mostly service mobile robots, including ground and flying types.