Production Systems for Multirobot Control: A Tutorial

Abstract

Current robot control systems and their programming languages are designed to handle completely specified tasks. They can be characterized by elaborate flow of control, primarily serial processing, and substantial syntactic constraint (e.g., autopass,⁽⁴⁾ al,⁽²⁾ wave,⁽⁵⁾ etc.). Such systems are poorly suited to the problem of providing robots with a local intelligence capability. As the complexity of the task that the system is expected to perform increases, there is a corresponding increase in the complexity of the robot programming and control system design. In direct contrast to current robot programming systems, which belong to the class of procedural systems, is the class of production languages. This chapter introduces production systems, which are highly parallel, do not require elaborate control constructs, and are particularly valuable for implementing heuristically specified tasks.