Housekeeping with Multiple Autonomous Robots : Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning for a Tightly Integrated Robot Control Architecture

We embed knowledge representation and automated reasoning in each level of the classical 3-layer robot control architecture, in such a way as to tightly integrate these layers. At the high-level, we represent not only actions and change but also commonsense knowledge in the action description language C+. Geometric reasoning is lifted to the high-level by embedding motion planning in the domain description, using external predicates. Then a discrete plan is computed for each robot, using the causal reasoner CCALC. At the mid-level, if a continuous trajectory is not computed by a motion planner because the discrete plan is not feasible at the continuous-level, then formal queries are asked to the causal reasoner to find a different plan subject to some (temporal) conditions represented as formulas. At the low-level, if the plan execution fails, then a new continuous trajectory is computed by a motion planner at the mid-level or a new discrete plan is computed using an automated reasoner at the high-level. We apply this tightly integrated robot control architecture in a housekeeping domain with multiple autonomous robots, and illustrate this application with a simulation.