Logic specifications for multiple robots based on a current programming language

This paper describes a concurrent logic specification language for developing programs that control multiple robots. This language is based on guarded Horn clauses and specifications are automatically transformed into concurrent logic programs, yielding executable specifications. They makes it possible to easily implement complex tasks such as concurrency control, communication and multiagent-type problem solving for multiple robots. An experiment on program development for multiple manipulators was undertaken to show advantages of the specification language. The resulting observations are twofold. First, specifications are more abstract and natural than conventional procedure-oriented programs. Second, the amounts of specifications are very shorter than that of the programs developed by the underlying concurrent logic programming language. Since transformed concurrent logic programs are then compiled into C programs with little overhead, the proposed language can be useful as a multiple robot programming language with the efficiency for both program execution and development.