Giuseppe De Giacomo
Abstract
When it comes to building controllers for robots or agents, high level programming languages like Golog and ConGolog offer a useful compromise between planning-based approaches and low-level robot programming. However, two serious problems typically emerge in practical implementations of these languages: how to evaluate test in a program efficiently enough in an open-world setting, and how to make appropiate nondeterministic choices while avoiding full lookahead. Recent proposals in the literature suggest that one could tackle the first problem by exploiting sensing information, and tackle the second by specifying the amount of lookahead allowed explicitly in the program. In this paper, we combine these two ideas and demonstrate their power by presenting an interpreter, written in Prolog, for a variant of Golog that is suitable for efficiently operating in open-world setting by exploiting sensing and bounded lookahead.
- APT,K.R.AND BEZEM, M. 1991. Acyclic programs. New Generation Computing 9, 335-363.Google Scholar
Digital Library
- APT,K.R.AND PEDRESCHI, D. 1993. Reasoning about termination of pure Prolog programs. Information and Computation 106, 1, 109-157. Google ScholarDigital Library
- APT,K.R.AND PELLEGRINI, A. 1994. On the occur-check free Prolog program. ACM Toplas 16,3, 687-726. Google ScholarDigital Library
- BARAL,C.AND SON, T. C. 1997. Approximate reasoning about actions in presence of sensing and incomplete information. In International Logic Programming Symposium (ILSP' 97), J. Maluszynski, Ed. MIT Press, Port Je erson, NY, 387-401. Google ScholarDigital Library
- BARAL, C., GELFOND, M., AND PROVETTI, A. 1997. Representing actions: Laws, observations and hypotheses. Journal of Logic Programming 31, 210-244.Google ScholarCross Ref
- BEST, E. 1996. Semantics of Sequential and Parallel Programs. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. Google ScholarDigital Library
- CLARK, K. 1978. Negation as failure. In Logic and Data Base, H. Gallaire and J. Minker, Eds. Plenum Press, New York, 292-322.Google Scholar
- DE GIACOMO,G.AND LEVESQUE, H. 1999a. An incremental interpreter for high-level programs with sensing. In Logical Foundation for Cognitive Agents: Contributions in Honor of Ray Reiter,H.J. Levesque and F. Pirri, Eds. Springer, Berlin, 86-102.Google Scholar
- DE GIACOMO,G.AND LEVESQUE, H. 1999b. Projection using regression and sensors. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Stockholm, Sweden, 160-165. Google ScholarDigital Library
- DE GIACOMO, G., LESPERANCE,Y.,AND LEVESQUE, H. 2000. ConGolog, a concurrent programming language based on the situation calculus. Artificial Intelligence 121, 1-2, 109-169. Google ScholarDigital Library
- DE GIACOMO, G., REITER, R., AND SOUTCHANSKI, M. 1998. Execution monitoring of high-level robot programs. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'98). 453-465.Google Scholar
- GOLDEN, K., ETZIONI,O.,AND WELD, D. 1996. Planning with execution and incomplete information. Tech. Rep. UW-CSE-96-01-09, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. University of Washington. April.Google Scholar
- HENNESSY, M. 1990. The Semantics of Programming Languages. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England. Google ScholarDigital Library
- JONSSON,P.AND BACKSTROM, C. 1995. Incremental planning. In New Directions in AI Planning: EWSP'95-3rd European Workshop on Planning, M. Ghallab and A. Milani, Eds. IOS Press, Assisi, Italy, 79-80. Google ScholarDigital Library
- KOWALSKI, R. A. 1995. Using meta-logic to reconcile reactive with rational agents. In Meta-Logics and Logic Programming, K. R. Apt and F. Turini, Eds. MIT Press, 227-242. Google ScholarDigital Library
- KOWALSKI,R.A.AND SADRI, F. 1999. From logic programming to multi-agent systems. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 25, 3-4, 391-419. Google ScholarDigital Library
- KOWALSKI,R.A.AND SERGOT, M. J. 1986. A logic-based calculus of events. New Generation Computing 4, 67-95. Google ScholarDigital Library
- LAKEMEYER, G. 1999. On sensing and off-line interpreting in Golog. In Logical Foundations for Cognitive Agents, Contributions in Honor of Ray Reiter. Springer, Berlin, 173-187.Google Scholar
- LEVESQUE, H. 1996. What is planning in the presence of sensing? In The Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-96. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Portland, Oregon, 1139-1146. Google ScholarDigital Library
- LEVESQUE, H., REITER, R., LESPERANCE, Y., LIN,F.,AND SCHERL, R. 1997. GOLOG: A logic programming language for dynamic domains. Journal of Logic Programming 31, 59-84.Google ScholarCross Ref
- MCCARTHY,J.AND HAYES, P. J. 1969. Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Machine Intelligence 4, 463-502.Google Scholar
- MILLER,R.AND SHANAHAN, M. 1994. Narratives in the situation calculus. The Journal of Logic and Computation 4, 5, 513-530.Google ScholarCross Ref
- NIELSON,H.R.AND NIELSON, F. 1992. Semantics with Applications: A Formal Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England. Google ScholarDigital Library
- PLOTKIN, G. 1981. A structural approach to operational semantics. Tech. Rep. Technical Report DAIMI-FN-19, Computer Science Department Aarhus University Denmark.Google Scholar
- REITER, R. 1991. The frame problem in the situation calculus: A simple solution (sometimes) and a completeness result for goal regression. In Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in Honor of John McCarthy, V. Lifschitz, Ed. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 359-380. Google ScholarDigital Library
- REITER, R. 2000. Narratives as programs. In Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference (KR2000). Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA.Google ScholarDigital Library
- SHANAHAN, M. 1999. What sort of computation mediates best between perception and action? In Logical Fundations for Cognitive Agents: Contributions in Honor of Ray Reiter, H. Levesque and F. Pirri, Eds. Springer-Verlag, 352-368.Google Scholar
- WALDINGER, R. 1977. Achieving several goals simultaneously. Machine Intelligence 8, 94-136.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Incremental execution of guarded theories
Recommendations
Domain-dependent knowledge in answer set planning
In this article we consider three different kinds of domain-dependent control knowledge (temporal, procedural and HTN-based) that are useful in planning. Our approach is declarative and relies on the language of logic programming with answer set ...
Reviews
Matthew Mark Huntbach
The authors extend previous work that introduced the Golog language. Golog is a language for reasoning about state and change, based on the situation calculus, and implemented as a Prolog interpreter. The extension enables an agent programmed in the language to reason by using sensor information, as well as by using rules stating how situations will change after actions are performed. This means a closed world assumption is no longer required. As an example, an agent may reason that a light is on because it was switched on in a past situation, and since then, the agent has not performed any action that would switch it off. In the extension, an agent may reason that a light is switched on because its light sensor tells it this is so. Or, an agent may reason that a light is on because the agent’s light sensor has told it so in the past, and the agent has performed no action since then that would switch the light off. Golog has the capacity to alternate between online and offline modes during execution. In online execution, commands are executed by real actions and cannot be undone. Offline execution represents planning ahead, so commands can be undone, and non-deterministic alternatives explored. In offline execution, an agent can reason forward from sensor readings it already knows, but obviously will not know the sensor readings of the future. The formalism in the paper should not be beyond the competence of any computer scientist willing to commit a little time. Familiarity with Prolog will help readers to grasp the parts on implementation. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments