ActBot: Sharing high-level robot AI scripts

Abstract

Robot behaviors are often hard-coded by skilled engineers to perform specific actions in reaction to specific events. These codes are either high level and difficult to extend to new domains (for example chatbot scripts that are restricted to dialogs) or low-level and difficult to aggregate as a corpus (like robot control AIs). In this paper a general script format is proposed for event-triggered rules definition of high-level decisions systems (dialog, actuation decision, display, etc). Using such format, merging two robot AI can be done by simply concatenating two sets of rules (like in AIML Chatbot). Our proposal format is inspired by hypergraph theory and solutions several problems found in classic decision knowledge representations. We dubbed the format ActBot (in reference to ChatBot).