Planning with sensing, concurrency, and exogenous events: logical framework and implementation

The focus of current research in cognitive robotics is both on the realization of systems based on known formal settings and on the extension of previous formal approaches to account for features that play a significant role for autonomous robots, but have not yet received an adequate treatment. In this paper we adopt a formal framework derived from Propositional Dynamic Logics by exploiting their formal correspondence with Description Logics, and present an extension of such a framework obtained by introducing both concurrency on primitive actions and autoepistemic operators for explicitly representing the robot's epistemic state. We show that the resulting formal setting allows for the representation of actions with context-dependent effects, sensing actions, and concurrent actions, and address both the presence of exogenous events and the characterization of the notion of executable plan in such a complex setting. Moreover, we present an implementation of this framework in a system which is capable of generating plans that are actually executed on mobile robots, and illustrate the experimentation of such a system in the design and implementation of soccer players for the 1999 Robocup competition