Incremental execution of guarded theories

Abstract

When it comes to building controllers for robots or agents, high level programming languages like Golog and ConGolog offer a useful compromise between planning-based approaches and low-level robot programming. However, two serious problems typically emerge in practical implementations of these languages: how to evaluate test in a program efficiently enough in an open-world setting, and how to make appropiate nondeterministic choices while avoiding full lookahead. Recent proposals in the literature suggest that one could tackle the first problem by exploiting sensing information, and tackle the second by specifying the amount of lookahead allowed explicitly in the program. In this paper, we combine these two ideas and demonstrate their power by presenting an interpreter, written in Prolog, for a variant of Golog that is suitable for efficiently operating in open-world setting by exploiting sensing and bounded lookahead.