High-Level Robot Programming: An Abductive Approach Using Event Calculus

This paper proposes a new language that can be used to build high-level robot controllers with high-level cognitive functions such as plan specification, plan generation, plan execution, perception, goal formulation, communication and collaboration. The proposed language is based on Golog, a language that uses the situation calculus as a formalism to describe actions and deduction as an inference rule to synthesize plans. On the other hand, instead of situation calculus and deduction, the new language uses event calculus and abductive reasoning to synthesize plans. As we can forsee, this change of paradigm allows the agent to reason about partial order plans, making possible a more flexible integration between deliberative and reactive behaviors.