Abstract: Robots situated in open environment are expected to be context-aware and autonomous,to support concurrent behaviours,and to react to external stimuli in a timely manner.To program such robots,a robot programming language is required to explicitly represent environmental factors,support decision-making and concurrency,specify temporal,special and physical relations among robot behaviours,and prioritize concurrent robot behaviours to avoid collision.Agent-oriented programming (AOP) provides a new solution to robot programming by taking software units as autonomous agents.Based on the requirements for robot programminges language,agent-oriented programming model—RECA and programming language—RPL based on reactive agent were proposed.RECA programming model which takes robot software as a reactive agent consists of three elements.SensorEvent shows environmental changes；ScenarioBehaviour are the different behaviour specifications for robots,and EventRule defines the dynamic mapping relations from environmental inputs to behavioral outputs.RPL was designed to meet the needs of robot programming,by providing various mechanisms supporting event-based programming,multi-thread programming,prioritization of robot behaviours,and dynamic binding of robot behaviours.We designed and implemented a programming and runtime environment for the RPL,and demonstrated the expressiveness of RPL and the effectiveness of its runtime environment through a case study of elder assistant robot.

Key words: Robots,Control software,Agent-oriented programming