Knowledge considerations in robotics and distribution of robotic tasks

Abstract

We develop a formal tool for representing and analyzing informational aspects of robotic tasks, based on the formal concept of 'knowledge.' Specifically, we adopt the notion of knowledge-based protocols from distributed systems, and define the notions of knowledge complexity of a robotic task and knowledge capability of a robot. The resulting formalism naturally captures previous work in the areas of robot information management, but is sufficiently rigorous and natural to allow many extensions. In this paper we show one novel application- the automated distribution of robotic tasks. 1