Lecture Notes in Computer Science

2 primary works

Concurrent Reactive Plans

by Michael Beetz

Published 8 March 2000

In this book, the author presents a new computational model of forestalling common flaws in autonomous robot behavior. To this end, robots are equipped with structured reactive plans (SRPs) which are concurrent control programs that can not only be interpreted but also be reasoned about and manipulated. The author develops a representation for SRPs in which declarative statements for goals, perceptions, and beliefs make the structure and purpose of SRPs explicit and thereby simplify and speed up reasoning about SRPs and their projections; furthermore a notation is introduced allowing for transforming and manipulating SRPs. Using this notation, a planning system can diagnose and forestall common flaws in robot plans that cannot be dealt with in other planning representations. Finally the language for writing SRPs is extended into a high-level language that can handle both planning and execution actions.

Plan-Based Control of Robotic Agents

by Michael Beetz

Published 13 December 2002

Robotic agents, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. Thus, they have to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities.

This book makes three major contributions to improving the capabilities of robotic agents:

- first, a plan representation method is introduced which allows for specifying flexible and reliable behavior

- second, probabilistic hybrid action models are presented as a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern concurrent percept-driven robot plans

- third, the system XFRMLEARN capable of learning structured symbolic navigation plans is described in detail.