Relating Theories of Actions and Reactive Control
Chitta Baral and Son Cao Tran
Abstract.
In this paper
we give a formal characterization of reactive control
using action theories. In the process we formalize the notion of a
reactive control program being correct with respect to a given
goal, a set of initial states, and action theories about the
agent/robot and about the exogenous actions. We give sufficiency
conditions that guarantee correctness and use it to give an
automatic method for constructing provenly
correct control modules. We then extend our approach
to action theories and control modules that have specialized
sensing actions and that encode conditional plans. Finally
we briefly relate our theory with the implementation of our mobile
robot Diablo, which successfully competed in AAAI 96 and 97
mobile robot contests.