Formalizing sensing actions --
a transition function based approach.
Chitta Baral and Tran Cao Son.
Abstract
In presence of incomplete information about the world
we need to distinguish between the state of the world
and the state of the agent's knowledge about the world.
In such a case the agent may need to have at its
disposal sensing actions that change its state of knowledge
about the world and may need to construct more general
plans consisting of sensing actions and conditional statements
to achieve its goal. In this paper we first develop
a high level action description language that allows specification
of sensing actions and their effects in its domain description
and allows queries with conditional plans.
We give provably correct translations of
domain description in our language to axioms in first-order
logic and logic programming, and relate our
formulation to several earlier formulations in the literature.
We then analyze the state-space of our
formulation and develop
several sound approximations that have much smaller state-spaces.