Moving a Robot Starting From a Theory of Actions

Contents

The paper describes an approach to reasoning about actions and planning that starting from a logical formalization arrives at the realization of an actual agent, the mobile robot "Tino". The reasoning tools allow the robot to derive plans from the knowledge about the environment and the action specification, while its reactive capabilities allow it to execute its plans in the real world. The formalization is based on the propositional dynamic logics framework, but exploits the correspondence that exists between propositional dynamic logics and description logics, to carefully weaken the logical inference process in order to keep the reasoning tools of the robot both effective and efficient. Such reasoning tools are then implemented by making use of a general knowledge representation system based on description logics, namely the system classIC.