Structured Circuit Semantics for Reactive Plan Execution Systems

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Volume

Robotics

Formal Models of Reactive Control

A variety of reactive plan execution systems have been developed in recent years, each attempting to solve the problem of taking reasonable courses of action fast enough in a dynamically changing world. Comparing these competing approaches, and collecting the best features of each, has been problematic because of the diverse representations and (sometimes implicit) control structures that they have employed. To rectify this problem, we have extended the circuit semantics notion of teleo-reactive programs into richer, yet compact semantics, called structured circuit semantics (SCS), that can be used to explicitly represent the control behavior of various reactive execution systems. By transforming existing systems into SCS, we can identify underlying control assumptions and begin to identify more rigorously the strengths and limitations of these systems. Moreover, SCS provides a basis for constructing new reactive execution systems, with more understandable semantics, that can be tailored to particular domain needs.