PRS: a high level supervision and control language for autonomous mobile robots

Abstract

We discuss Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) as a high-level control and supervision language adapted to autonomous robots to represent and execute procedures, scripts and plans in dynamic environments. We discuss the main reasons why PRS is well suited for this type of application: (1) The semantics of its plan (procedure) representation, which is important for plan execution and goal refinement; (2) Its ability to construct and act on partial (rather than complete) plans; (3) Its ability to pursue goal-directed tasks while at the same time being responsive to changing patterns of events in bounded time; (4) Its facilities for managing multiple tasks in real-time; (5) Its default mechanisms for handling stringent real-time demands of its environment; and (6) Its meta-level (or reflective) reasoning capabilities. C-PRS has been used to implement an embedded control and supervision system for autonomous mobile robots in two different experimentations that we briefly present. We conclude with some suggestions to further develop C-PRS and with a short review of related work.