Towards Programming Tools for Robots that Integrate Probabilistic Computation and Learning

This paper describes a programming language extension of C++, called CES, specifically targeted towards mobile robot control. CES’s design is motivated by a recent series of successful probabilistic methods for mobile robot control, with the goal of facilitating the development of such probabilistic software in future robot applications. CES extends C++ by two ideas: Computing with probability distributions, and built-in mechanisms for learning from examples as a new means of programming. An example program, used to control a mail-delivering robot with gesture commend interface, illustrates that CES may reduce the code development by two orders of magnitude. CES differs from other special-purpose programming languages in the field, which typically emphasize concurrency and real-time/event-driven processing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Sebastian Thrun
• Keywords: Ces Extends C++, ICRA 2000, Mobile Robot Control, Programming Languages, Robotics