Over the last two years, we have applied methodologies developed for domain-specific embedded languages to create a high-level robot control language called Frob, for Functional Robotics. The goal of Frob is to provide an environment where robot software can be clearly, cleanly, and correctly specified, while suppressing unnecessary implementation detail. To this end, Frob incorporates three important notions: an implicit representation of time, equational specification of continuous-time behaviors and asynchronous events, and functions to construct complex, reusable abstractions. We show that these ideas can be combined to produce many commonly used "higher-level" abstractions for specifying robot programs. Experience with this approach to robot programming suggests that it leads to effective development of robot software while producing programs that are readable and can be reasoned about in a formal sense.

Gregory Harold Cooper was born on New Year’s Day of 1978 in South County, Rhode Island. He has enjoyed mathematics and logic since he can remember and was addicted to computer programming by age 7. He was valedictorian of the class of 1996 at North Kingstown High School and a National Merit Scholar and Barry M. Goldwater Scholar at the University of Rhode Island. He also received an honorable mention in the National