Reasoning and Acting in Time

Abstract

Cognitive robotics is that branch of artificial intelligence concerned with “the study of the knowledge representa-tion and reasoning problems faced by an autonomous robot (or agent) in a dynamic and incompletely known world” (Levesque & Reiter 1998, p. 106). My work is not aimed at solving all the problems of cognitive robotics; rather, it is about studying, fleshing out, and investigating solutions to a subset of them. In particular, a subset of those problems that face an agent reasoning and acting in time. To understand what this exactly means, a number of general assumptions about what is reasonably to be expected from an embodied cognitive agent should first be pointed out. First, to appropriately behave in a changing world, an agent must be aware of its environment and the outcome of its acts, and ready to recover from errors, interrupts, and fail-