A robot must often react to events in its environment and exceptional conditions by suspendingor abandoning its current plan and selecting a new plan that is an appropriate response to the event. This paper describes how high-level controllers for robots that are reactive in this sense can conveniently be implemented in ConGolog, a new logic-based agent/robot programming language. Reactivity is achievedby exploitingConGolog’sprioritized concurrentprocessesand interrupts facilities. The language also provides nondeterministic constructs that supporta form of planning.Program execution relies on a declarative domain theory to model the state of the robot and its environment.The approachis illustrated with a mail delivery application.
Yves Lespérance, Kenneth Tam, Michael R. M.