Magnus Egerstedt
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Linguistic control of mobile robots
When humans give each other directions only tokenized, linguistic instructions are used. In contrast to this, classic control theory relies on the ability to specify a control action at each time instant. In this talk, a linguistic control theory will be presented, based on the motion description language formalism, and the interactions between symbolic (computer generated) instructions and mechanical devices will be given a hybrid representation. A complexity measure will furthermore be defined on the input strings that measures the number of bits needed for coding the instructions. This measure serves as a novel tool for studying optimal coding strategies, as well as sensor and actuator selections for mobile robots, thus providing a unified framework in which a number of questions in robotics can coexist.