Cognitive Robotics

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Ray Reiter. It is also an overview of cognitive robotics, as we understand it to have been envisaged by him.1 Of course, nobody can control the use of a term or the direction of research. We apologize in advance to those who feel that other approaches to cognitive robotics and related problems are inadequately represented here

Decision-Theoretic Planning with Linguistic Terms in GOLOG

Abstract In this paper we propose an extension of the action language GOLOG that integrates linguistic terms in non-deterministic argument choices and the reward function for decision-theoretic planning. It is often cumbersome to specify the set of values to pick from in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement. Also, specifying a reward function is not always easy, even for domain experts. Instead of providing a finite domain for values in the non-deterministic-choice-of-argument statement in GOLOG, we now allow for stating the argument domain by simply providing a formula over linguistic terms and fuzzy fluents. In GOLOG's forwardsearch DT planning algorithm, these formulas are evaluated in order to find the agent's optimal policy. We illustrate this in the Diner Domain where the agent needs to calculate the optimal serving order

On-Line Execution of cc-Golog Plans

Previously, the plan language cc-Golog was introduced for the purpose of specifying event-driven behavior typically found in robot controllers. So far, however, cc-Golog is usable only for projecting the outcome of a plan and it is unclear how to actually execute plans on-line on a robot. In this paper, we provide such an execution model for ccGolog and, in addition, show how to interleave execution with a new kind of time-bounded projection. Along the wa

Towards Bridging the Gap between High-Level Reasoning and Execution on Robots

When reasoning about actions, e.g., by means of task planning or agent programming with Golog, the robot's actions are typically modeled on an abstract level, where complex actions such as picking up an object are treated as atomic primitives with deterministic effects and preconditions that only depend on the current state. However, when executing such an action on a robot it can no longer be seen as a primitive. Instead, action execution is a complex task involving multiple steps with additional temporal preconditions and timing constraints. Furthermore, the action may be noisy, e.g., producing erroneous sensing results and not always having the desired effects. While these aspects are typically ignored in reasoning tasks, they need to be dealt with during execution. In this thesis, we propose several approaches towards closing this gap.Comment: PhD Thesi