| Abstract: |
I describe an architecture for linking perception and action
in a robot. It consists of three “towers” of layered components.
The “perception tower” contains rules that create increasingly
abstract descriptions of the current environmental situation starting with
the primitive predicates produced by the robot’s sensory apparatus.
These descriptions are deposited in a “model tower” thich is continuously
kept faithful to the current environmental situation by a “truth-maintenance”
system. The predicates in the model tower, in turn, evoke appropriate action-producing
programs in the “action tower.” It is proposed that the actions
be written as “teleo-reactive” programs – ones that react
dynamically to changing situations in ways that lead inexorably toward their
goals. Programs in the the action tower are organized more-or-less hierarchially
– bottoming out ni programs that cause the robot to take primitive
actions in its environment. The effects of the actions are sensed by the
robot’s sensory mechanism, completing a sense-model-act cycle that
is quiescent only at those times when the robot’s goal is perceived
to be satisfied. I illustrate the operation of the architecture using a
simple block-stacking task. |
