Reactive Behavior Design Tools

The behavior of sensor based autonomous agents can be stratified into three basic levels. The first is low-level motor and sensor control, the second is mid-level reactive processes and the third is high-level end goals of the robotic device. The middle level of control, reactive processes, is the area of concern in this work, This behavior can be described by collections of finite state machines, and these machines can be implemented to produce real behavior. Problems arise if these state machines do not actually model correct behavior, so a means to verify the behavior is needed.; This thesis consists of two steps towards the goal of rapid design and verification of reactive behaviors. First a graphical state machine editor is developed to provide translation of behavioral state machines into COSPAN, a real time programming language. The resulting state machine description can be analyzed by COSPAN for user defined concepts of correctness. The second portion of the thesis describes the design of reactive behaviors for specific applications.