Taxonomy of Atomic Actions for Home-Service Robots

Abstract

In household environments, robots are expected to conduct many tasks. It is difficult, however, to write programs for all tasks beforehand ddue to task diversity and changing environmental conditions. One basic task of developing autonomous multifunctional robots is to define a set of basic robot actions that are executed unambiguously and checked for completion. A task planner then uses these actions to accomplish complex tasks that home-service robots are expected to do. This paper first proposes a set of tasks for first-generation home-service robots, then systematically decomposes them into sequences of smaller but meaningful actions called molecular actions. Molecular actions are then broken down into yet more primitive actions called atomic actions. Because vision, sound, range sensors, and force sensors are the main means of monitoring task progress and ompletion, atomic actions are classified based on the complexities and frequencies of the sensing algorithms used. The resulting taxonomy of atomic actions serves as a set of basic building blocks for a knowledge-based task planner. Its advantages are verified and demonstrated through experiments.