Relating Theories of Actions and Reactive Robot Control

In this paper we explore the connection between theories of actions and reactive robot control architectures that are based on the paradigm of situated activity. In particular, we use the entailment relation of the action description language to formalize the notion of `an action leading to a goal' of Kaelbling and Rosenschein. Content Areas: Robotics, Theory of Action 1 Introduction Research in theories of actions [Bro87, Wor95, Geo94] is concerned with developing formal theories that allows us to represent effects of actions on the world and reason about them. One of the main agenda behind research in reasoning about actions is to develop autonomous agents (robots) that can act in a dynamic world. The early attempts to use theories of reasoning about actions and planning to formulate a robot control architecture were not successful for several reasons: ffl The early theories based on STRIPS and its extensions allowed only observations about the initial state. A robot control archit..