Probabilistic Programming Languages for Modeling Autonomous Systems

We present a robotic development framework called ROSPPL, which can accomplish many of the essential probabilistic tasks that comprise modern autonomous systems and is based on a general purpose probabilistic programming language (PPL). Benefiting from ROS integration, a short PPL program in our framework is capable of controlling a robotic system, estimating its current state online, as well as automatically calibrating parameters and detecting errors, simply through probabilistic model and policy specification. The advantage of our approach lies in its generality which makes it useful for quickly designing and prototyping of new robots. By directly modeling the interconnection of random variables, decoupled from the inference engine, our design benefits from robustness, re-usability, upgradability, and ease of specification. In this paper, we use a SDV as an example of a complex autonomous system, to show how different sub-components of such system could be implemented using a probabilistic programming language, in a way that the system is capable of reasoning about itself. Our set of use-cases include localization, mapping, fault detection, calibration, and planning.