The Motion Grammar: Linguistic Perception, Planning, and Control

Abstract

We present the Motion Grammar: a novel unified representation for task decomposition, perception, planning, and hybrid control that provides a computationally tractable way to control robots in uncertain environments with guarantees on completeness and correctness. The grammar represents a policy for the task which is parsed in real-time based on perceptual input. Branches of the syntax tree form the levels of a hierarchical decomposition, and the individual robot sensor readings are given by tokens. We implement this approach in the interactive game of Yamakuzushi on a physical robot resulting in a system that repeatably competes with a human opponent in sustained game-play for matches up to six minutes.