What Observations Really Tell Us

When agents like mobile robots make observations while carrying out a course of actions, a formalization of the observed information is needed in order to reason about it. When doing so in the situation calculus, a seemingly straightforward approach turns out to be inappropriate since it leads to unintended results and has an unfortunate sensitivity with respect to different forms of successor state axioms. In this paper we suggest how to properly encode observed information in order to avoid both of these problems.

[1]  Sheila A. McIlraith.  Explanatory Diagnosis: Conjecturing Actions to Explain Observations , 1998, KR.

[2]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Foundations for the Situation Calculus , 1998, Electron. Trans. Artif. Intell..

[3]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Projection Using Regression and Sensors , 1999, IJCAI.

[4]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  GOLOG: A Logic Programming Language for Dynamic Domains , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[5]  Murray Shanahan,et al.  Narratives in the Situation Calculus , 1994, J. Log. Comput..

[6]  Vladimir Lifschitz,et al.  Artificial intelligence and mathematical theory of computation: papers in honor of John McCarthy , 1991 .

[7]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  An Incremental Interpreter for High-Level Programs with Sensing , 1999 .

[8]  Donald Michie,et al.  Machine Intelligence 4 , 1970 .

[9]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Experiences with an Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot , 1999, Artif. Intell..

[10]  Michael Gelfond,et al.  Diagnostics with answer sets: Dealing with unobservable fluents , 2002 .

[11]  Gero Iwan,et al.  History-based diagnosis templates in the framework of the situation calculus , 2001, AI Commun..

[12]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Some contributions to the metatheory of the situation calculus , 1999, JACM.

[13]  Sheila A. McIlraith,et al.  What Sensing Tells Us: Towards a Formal Theory of Testing for Dynamical Systems , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[14]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems , 2001 .

[15]  Tran Cao Son,et al.  Formulating diagnostic problem solving using an action language with narratives and sensing , 2000, KR.

[16]  Alex M. Andrew,et al.  Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems , 2002 .

[17]  J. McCarthy.  Situations, Actions, and Causal Laws , 1963 .

[18]  Chitta Baral,et al.  Representing Actions: Laws, Observations and Hypotheses , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[19]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  The Frame Problem in the Situation Calculus: A Simple Solution (Sometimes) and a Completeness Result for Goal Regression , 1991, Artificial and Mathematical Theory of Computation.

[20]  Michael Gelfond,et al.  Representing Actions in Extended Logic Programming , 1992, JICSLP.

[21]  Javier Pinto,et al.  Occurrences and Narratives as Constraints in the Branching Structure of the Situation Calculus , 1998, J. Log. Comput..

[22]  Marvin Minsky,et al.  Semantic Information Processing , 1968 .

[23]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Logical Foundations for Cognitive Agents: Contributions in Honor of Ray Reiter , 2001 .

[24]  Michael Gelfond,et al.  Representing Action and Change by Logic Programs , 1993, J. Log. Program..

[25]  John McCarthy,et al.  SOME PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ARTI CIAL INTELLIGENCE , 1987 .