Towards Capability-Based Synthesis of Executable Robot Behaviors

This paper describes a system wide approach to synthesizing executable robot behaviors based on system capabilities. The approach builds upon prior work with the Flexible Behavior Engine (FlexBE), which uses hierarchical finite state machines (HFSM) to implement and execute robot behaviors. This paper extends prior work that integrated Linear Temporal Logic (LTL)-based automata synthesis into FlexBE by automatically generating the required configuration files based on distributed specifications of deployed system capabilities. Given this information, an end user can use existing tools to synthesize a reactive behavioral state machine (if realizable) given task specifications. The paper describes experiments executing synthesized state machines on a small wheeled mobile robot called TurtleBot running the ROS Kinetic system.