Acting and Deliberating using Golog in Robotic Soccer — A Hybrid Architecture —

Abstract

Existing approaches to high-level robot control which support deliberation in one form or another usually do not view the time spent on reasoning as critical, which is true in typical applications like oce delivery. This is not so, however, in domains like robotic soccer where a team of robots must cooperate in a highly dynamic environment and where actions need to be chosen under tight resource constraints. For this reason, most existing systems for such domains rely on purely reactive architectures without a reasoning component. Our aim is to build robotic soccer agents which are capable of limited forms of deliberation using the action language Golog. In order to meet the real-time constraints, we propose a hybrid architecture which enables the robot to react to the environment very fast as well as to choose actions proposed by the reasoning component. The hybrid nature of our approach manifests itself not only in the dierence between high-level control and low-level routines such as self-localization, but also within the action selection process, that is, within the high-level controller itself.