Our department is happy to announce a talk of Dr. Keith Clark (Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London) with the title: Rule Control of Goal Directed, Reactive, Communicating Robotic Agents. The talk starts at 13:00 on 22 Nov (Wed) in room IL408. Please find the abstract bellow. We are looking forward to welcome interested participants.

Rule Control of Goal Directed, Reactive, Communicating Robotic Agents

Keith Clark, Emeritus Professor, Imperial College London, (joint work with Peter Robinson, UQ)

We describe a mid-level multi-threaded robotic agent architecture in which multiple tasks, sharing one or more external robotic resources, are executed robustly and concurrently without: starvation, interference or deadlock. 

The tasks are programmed in a rule based language TeleoR. Sequences of TeleoR rules of the form:guard ~> action comprise the bodies of parameterised procedures.  

Each guard is a query to the agent’s Belief Store (BS) using Knowledge Rules expressed in a flexibly typed logic and function rule language QuLog.   

The BS comprises:

• percept facts frequently atomically updated by the agent’s percept handling thread
• communicated facts atomically updated by the agent’s message handling thread
• remembered facts atomically inserted by the agent’s task threads

 Each action comprises either:

• one or more robotic resource actions, to be executed in parallel
• a call to a TeleoR procedure, including a recursive call

The action may be paired with a non-robotic action sequence to send messages to other agents and/or update the BS. 

 We introduce the use of TeleoR, and the multi-threaded agent architecture, with two robot control applications: 

• Two robotic arm control for multiple block tower building tasks.  With colleagues at UNSW Sydney this has been ported to a Baxter robot, see the short video: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~klc/20160127-LABCOT-HIx4.mp4 
• Communicating  and co-operative multi-agent control of each of several track following robots moving through open doorways to a destination room, see: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~klc/pathFollowers.mp4

• In the second application communication is as important as perception. 

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Further details in the paper available here: https://cs.bme.hu/~szeredi/ArmsChallenge.pdf