Controlling physical agents through reactive logic programming

This paper describes Icarus, a language for specifying the behavior of agents that operate in physical domains. This language provides a novel metaphor of “reactive logic programming”, which makes it convenient to express both extremely reactive control programs and programs with non-trivial deliberative elements. The key features of Icarus are the ability to express hierarchical objectives, requirements, and actions, the use of Prolog-like semantics across function calls, a merged concept of state and action, and a sequence primitive, all embedded in a reactive control loop that considers every relevant action on every cycle of the interpreter. We use a body of examples to illustrate these features, and justify several claims about the expressivity of Icarus relative to existing reactive languages. 1 Introduction: Th