Special Seminar: Patrizio Pelliccione "Making Robots Usable in Everyday Life"

Making Robots Usable in Everyday Life

Patrizio Pelliccione

Abstract:

Mobile robots are increasingly used in everyday life to autonomously realize missions such as exploring rooms, delivering goods, or following certain paths for surveillance. The current robotic market is asking for a radical shift in the development of robotic applications where missions specification is performed by robotic users that are not highly qualified and specialized in robotics or ICT.

To this aim, we first present a catalog of 22 mission specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships to other patterns, and—most importantly—a template solution in temporal logic. The patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 449 real-world mission requirements.

Then, we  propose a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that enables nontechnical users to specify missions for a team of autonomous robots in a user-friendly and effective way. The DSL contains a set of atomic tasks that can be executed by robots and a set of operators that allow the composition of these tasks in complex missions. Mission specification can be performed through a textual and a graphical interface. While the DLS support is provided by a standalone tool and can be integrated within a variety of frameworks, the current implementation has been integrated with a software platform that provides a set of functionalities, including motion control, collision avoidance, image recognition, SLAM, planning, etc. Our DSL has been successfully validated with both simulation and real robots.

Bio:

Patrizio Pelliccione (male) is an Associate Professor at DISIM - University of L’Aquila and an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. He got his PhD in 2005 at the University of L’Aquila (Italy) and from February 1, 2014 he is Docent in Software Engineering, title given by the University of Gothenburg. His research topics are mainly in software engineering, software architectures modelling and verification, autonomous systems, and formal methods. He has co-authored more than 120 publications in journals and international conferences and workshops in these topics. He has been on the program committees for several top conferences, he is a reviewer for top journals in the software engineering domain, and he organized as program chair international conferences like ICSA2017 and FormaliSE 2018. He is very active in European and National projects. He is the PI for Co4Robots H2020 EU project for the University of Gothenburg. In his research activity he has collaborated with several industries such as Volvo Cars, Volvo AB, Ericsson, Jeppesen, Axis communication, Systemite AB, Thales Italia, Selex Marconi telecommunications, Siemens, Saab, TERMA, etc. More information is available at http://www.patriziopelliccione.com.