Symbolic planning and control of robot motion - Finding the missing pieces of current methods and ideas

The aim of symbolic control is to enable the usage of methods of formal logic, languages and automata theory for solving effectively complex planning problems for robots and teams of robots. A grand challenge in this area is that of enabling a naive user to specify the daily chores of her/his domestic robotic appliances in plain natural language and automatically translate this in device-independent programs, to be downloaded and executed on robots, so as to obtain a dependable performance of the task in spite of the complexity and unpredictability of the environment. Several approaches to address such challenge are emerging and they fall into two groups: top-down approaches, whereby formal logic tools are employed on rather abstract models of robots; and bottoms up approaches, whose aim is to provide means by which such abstractions are possible and effective.