A theory and implementation of cognitive mobile robots

We describe an approach to reasoning agents which is based on a formal theory of actions and is actually implemented on a mobile robot working in an office environment. From an epistemiological viewpoint, our proposal is originated by the correspondence between Dynamic Logics and Description Logics, Specifically, we consider an epistemic extension of Description Logics to provide a new theoretical framework for the representation of dynamic systems, where the agent's reasoning is based on its knowledge about the world. In this setting, we obtain a weaker notion of logical inference, thus simplifying the reasoning task. From a practical viewpoint, we use a general purpose knowledge representation system based on Description Logics and its associated reasoning tools, in order to plan the actions of the mobile robot 'Tino', starting from the knowledge about the environment and the action specification. In addition, we exploit the robot's capabilities in order to integrate the execution of the plan with reactive behaviours, thus enabling the agent to accomplish its tasks in the real world.