5,568 research outputs found
REBA: A Refinement-Based Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics
This paper describes an architecture for robots that combines the
complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and declarative
programming to represent and reason with logic-based and probabilistic
descriptions of uncertainty and domain knowledge. An action language is
extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws. This
action language is used to describe tightly-coupled transition diagrams at two
levels of granularity, with a fine-resolution transition diagram defined as a
refinement of a coarse-resolution transition diagram of the domain. The
coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes (prioritized)
defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given
goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To
implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part
of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. A
probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation is
then included in this zoomed fine-resolution system description, and used to
construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy
obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract
action as a sequence of concrete actions, with the corresponding observations
being recorded in the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent
reasoning. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot
moving objects in an indoor domain, to show that it supports reasoning with
violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex
domains.Comment: 72 pages, 14 figure
Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions
Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life,
requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly
amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing
the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been
proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of
formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding
the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by
experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the
behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are
usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are
difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission
specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for
instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission
specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification
problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships
to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in
temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and
CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The
patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted
from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441
real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these
reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing
human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and
two real robots
Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation
Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible
Bayesian robot Programming
We propose a new method to program robots based on Bayesian inference and learning. The capacities of this programming method are demonstrated through a succession of increasingly complex experiments. Starting from the learning of simple reactive behaviors, we present instances of behavior combinations, sensor fusion, hierarchical behavior composition, situation recognition and temporal sequencing. This series of experiments comprises the steps in the incremental development of a complex robot program. The advantages and drawbacks of this approach are discussed along with these different experiments and summed up as a conclusion. These different robotics programs may be seen as an illustration of probabilistic programming applicable whenever one must deal with problems based on uncertain or incomplete knowledge. The scope of possible applications is obviously much broader than robotics
Inferring Robot Task Plans from Human Team Meetings: A Generative Modeling Approach with Logic-Based Prior
We aim to reduce the burden of programming and deploying autonomous systems
to work in concert with people in time-critical domains, such as military field
operations and disaster response. Deployment plans for these operations are
frequently negotiated on-the-fly by teams of human planners. A human operator
then translates the agreed upon plan into machine instructions for the robots.
We present an algorithm that reduces this translation burden by inferring the
final plan from a processed form of the human team's planning conversation. Our
approach combines probabilistic generative modeling with logical plan
validation used to compute a highly structured prior over possible plans. This
hybrid approach enables us to overcome the challenge of performing inference
over the large solution space with only a small amount of noisy data from the
team planning session. We validate the algorithm through human subject
experimentation and show we are able to infer a human team's final plan with
83% accuracy on average. We also describe a robot demonstration in which two
people plan and execute a first-response collaborative task with a PR2 robot.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates a logical
planning technique within a generative model to perform plan inference.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13
Answer Set Programming for Non-Stationary Markov Decision Processes
Non-stationary domains, where unforeseen changes happen, present a challenge
for agents to find an optimal policy for a sequential decision making problem.
This work investigates a solution to this problem that combines Markov Decision
Processes (MDP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Answer Set Programming
(ASP) in a method we call ASP(RL). In this method, Answer Set Programming is
used to find the possible trajectories of an MDP, from where Reinforcement
Learning is applied to learn the optimal policy of the problem. Results show
that ASP(RL) is capable of efficiently finding the optimal solution of an MDP
representing non-stationary domains
Technical Report: Distribution Temporal Logic: Combining Correctness with Quality of Estimation
We present a new temporal logic called Distribution Temporal Logic (DTL)
defined over predicates of belief states and hidden states of partially
observable systems. DTL can express properties involving uncertainty and
likelihood that cannot be described by existing logics. A co-safe formulation
of DTL is defined and algorithmic procedures are given for monitoring
executions of a partially observable Markov decision process with respect to
such formulae. A simulation case study of a rescue robotics application
outlines our approach.Comment: More expanded version of "Distribution Temporal Logic: Combining
Correctness with Quality of Estimation" to appear in IEEE CDC 201
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