Acting and Deliberating using Golog in Robotic Soccer — A Hybrid Architecture —

Existing approaches to high-level robot control which support deliberation in one form or another usually do not view the time spent on reasoning as critical, which is true in typical applications like office delivery. This is not so, however, in domains like robotic soccer where a team of robots must cooperate in a highly dynamic environment and where actions need to be chosen under tight resource constraints. For this reason, most existing systems for such domains rely on purely reactive architectures without a reasoning component. Our aim is to build robotic soccer agents which are capable of limited forms of deliberation using the action language Golog. In order to meet the real-time constraints, we propose to integrate Golog into a hybrid architecture, which enables the robot to react to the environment very fast as well as to choose actions proposed by the reasoning component. We feel that Golog is particularly well-suited for the reasoning component because it allows to limit the search space by programming complex actions and because of recent advances in extending the expressiveness of the language to deal with issues like continuous change, event-driven behavior, and uncertainty, all of which are important in a domain like robotic soccer.