Dynamic State Charts: composition and coordination of complex robot behavior and reuse of action plots

Support for separation of roles is decisive towards a successful business ecosystem where various stakeholders with dedicated expertises network and collaborate. However, it depends on means for composition(system of systems, reuse of black boxes). This paper proposes Dynamic State Charts as an extension of state charts for composition and coordination of complex robot behavior which is one of the challenges in service robotics. Their states allow to refine their content by choosing from a set of alternative matching state instances for robust task execution and to manage the complexity of real-world tasks. Dynamic State Charts allow reuse and can be bundled with software components and are provided in a repository (idea of an “robot app store”) as a step towards composition and separation of roles as necessary for a business ecosystem in service robotics. The approach is demonstrated in a practical application with a service robot.