7,303 research outputs found
Robot task planning and explanation in open and uncertain worlds
A long-standing goal of AI is to enable robots to plan in the face of uncertain and incomplete information, and to handle task failure intelligently. This paper shows how to achieve this. There are two central ideas. The first idea is to organize the robot's knowledge into three layers: instance knowledge at the bottom, commonsense knowledge above that, and diagnostic knowledge on top. Knowledge in a layer above can be used to modify knowledge in the layer(s) below. The second idea is that the robot should represent not just how its actions change the world, but also what it knows or believes. There are two types of knowledge effects the robot's actions can have: epistemic effects (I believe X because I saw it) and assumptions (I'll assume X to be true). By combining the knowledge layers with the models of knowledge effects, we can simultaneously solve several problems in robotics: (i) task planning and execution under uncertainty; (ii) task planning and execution in open worlds; (iii) explaining task failure; (iv) verifying those explanations. The paper describes how the ideas are implemented in a three-layer architecture on a mobile robot platform. The robot implementation was evaluated in five different experiments on object search, mapping, and room categorization
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Boy meets goal, boy loses goal, boy gets goal : the nature of feedback between goal-based simulation and understanding systems
We are designing a goal-based planning and simulation system called REACTOR for a multiple-actor world in which partially formulated plans are monitored during execution, providing feedback to the planner. Plan failures that occur are diagnosed by a combination of top-down (plan-synthesis) and bottom-up (plan-understanding) techniques, allowing an informed choice of response to the error. By maintaining separate belief spaces for each actor, we simulate planners who themselves simulate the planning and plan-understanding of other actors
KR: An Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics
This paper describes an architecture that combines the complementary
strengths of declarative programming and probabilistic graphical models to
enable robots to represent, reason with, and learn from, qualitative and
quantitative descriptions of uncertainty and knowledge. An action language is
used for the low-level (LL) and high-level (HL) system descriptions in the
architecture, and the definition of recorded histories in the HL is expanded to
allow prioritized defaults. For any given goal, tentative plans created in the
HL using default knowledge and commonsense reasoning are implemented in the LL
using probabilistic algorithms, with the corresponding observations used to
update the HL history. Tight coupling between the two levels enables automatic
selection of relevant variables and generation of suitable action policies in
the LL for each HL action, and supports reasoning with violation of defaults,
noisy observations and unreliable actions in large and complex domains. The
architecture is evaluated in simulation and on physical robots transporting
objects in indoor domains; the benefit on robots is a reduction in task
execution time of 39% compared with a purely probabilistic, but still
hierarchical, approach.Comment: The paper appears in the Proceedings of the 15th International
Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR 2014
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