Knowledge Considerations in Robotics and Distribution of Robotic Tasks

We develop a formal tool for representing and analyzing informational aspects of robotic tasks, based on the formal concept of `knowledge. ' Specifically, we adopt the notion of knowledge-based protocols from distributed systems, and define the notions of knowledge complexity of a robotic task and knowledge capability of a robot. The resulting formalism naturally captures previous work in the areas of robot information management, but is sufficiently rigorous and natural to allow many extensions. In this paper we show one novel application -- the automated distribution of robotic tasks. 1 Introduction The notion of computational complexity has had a profound effect on the development of computer science. While still crude, our ability to classify different computational problems in terms of their complexity allows us to understand inherent difficulties in solving such problems. Some areas of robotics, such as motion planning, have benefited from advances in computational complexity (e..