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Robot Task Modeling

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Encyclopedia of Robotics

Synonyms

Analysis; Robot plan modelling; Robot task plan representation; Supervision and control

Definitions

A robot task can be described as a piece of work the robot is in charge of and must carry out. In most cases, one assumes some representation of the state of the world (which is a conceptualization of reality, adequate for the task in hand, without adding unnecessary complexity), and the robot task consists of making the system evolve from the current world state to a desired goal state, by executing the appropriate actions. The sequence of actions carried out to execute a task is called a plan, and the actions can be further decomposed into sub-actions, and those into sub-sub-actions and so on, until one reaches an atomic action which is not further decomposable, often designated as primitive actions. There are no universally accepted standard definitions, for tasks, plans, actions and primitive actions. Different authors use different plan decompositions and names for the...

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the FCT project LARSyS - FCT Project UIDB/50009/2020.

Special thanks to my former PhD students Bruno Lacerda and Hugo Costelha, who contributed, directly or indirectly, to this text. Thanks also to Davide Brugali for the interesting discussions that lead to the invitation to write this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro U. Lima

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  1. Pedro U. Lima
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Correspondence to Pedro U. Lima .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Marcelo H. Ang

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Bruno Siciliano

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Management Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Davide Brugali

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Lima, P.U. (2020). Robot Task Modeling. In: Ang, M., Khatib, O., Siciliano, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_9-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_9-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41610-1

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