Integrating Reaction Plans and Layered Competences Through Synchronous Control

Abstract

This paper describes an agent architecture and its implementation for situated robot control in field environments. The architecture draws from the ideas of universal plans and subsumption's layered control, producing reaction plans that exploit low-level competences as operators. The architecture has been implemented in an extended version of the GAPPS/Rex situated automata programming language. This language produces synchronous virtual circuits which have been shown to have formal epistemic properties. The resulting architecture exhibits robust task execution, has high-level goal representations, and maintains consistent semantics between agent states and the environment. Ongoing experiments using the architecture with two land mobile robots and one undersea mobile robot are described. The robots perform their tasks robustly during normal changes in the task environments.