Logic programming with simulation-based temporal projection for everyday robot object manipulation

In everyday object manipulation tasks, like making a pancake, autonomous robots are required to decide on the appropriate action parametrizations in order to achieve desired (and to avoid undesired) outcomes. For determining the right parameters for actions like pouring a pancake mix onto a pancake maker, robots need capabilities to predict the physical consequences of their own manipulation actions. In this work, we integrate a simulation-based approach for making temporal projections for robot manipulation actions into the logic programming language PROLOG. The realized system enables robots to determine action parameters that bring about certain effects by utilizing simulation-based temporal projections within PROLOG's chronological backtracking mechanism. For a set of formal parameters and their respective ranges of values, the developed system translates the manipulation problems into physical simulations, monitors and logs the relevant data structures of the simulations, translates the logged data back into first-order time-interval-based representations, called timelines, and eventually evaluates the individual timelines with respect to specified performance criteria. Integrating the proposed approach into robot control programs allow robots to mentally simulate the consequences of different action parametrizations before committing to them and thereby to reduce the number of undesired outcomes.