A scripting-based approach to robot behavior engineering using hierarchical generators

When developing software for autonomous robots, the aspect of behavior engineering is, among tasks such as sensing, state estimation, and motion control, of major importance. Current solutions range from basic behavior-based approaches to sophisticated reasoning systems, in each case depending on the complexity of the robot´s task as well as the available amount of computing time. In this paper, we present a behavior specification language, which is called b-script, to describe hierarchical agent behaviors using the programming concept of generators. We show that this is a convenient approach to realize complex robot behaviors in an intuitive and clean way that can be used in large-scale. Furthermore, the actual implementation of this language is in particular suited to be used on resource-restricted embedded systems. This is shown in different examples of a Nao robot in a robot soccer scenario.