Formal Theories for Reactive Planning Systems: some considerations raised from an experimental application

This paper is a first attempt towards a theory of actions for reactive planning systems, i.e. systems able to plan and control execution of plans in a partially known and unpredictable environment. We start from a real world application developed at resT, discuss some of the fundamental requirements and propose a formal theory based on these requirements. The theory takes into account the following facts: (1) actions may fail, since they correspond to complex programs controlling sensors and actuators which have to work in an unpredictable environment; (2) actions acquire information from the real world by activating sensors and actuators; (3) actions generate and execute plans of actions, since the planner needs to activate different special purpose planners and to execute the resulting plans.

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