Cognitive Robotics: On the Semantic Knife-edge

Abstract

This paper describes some aspects of recent and ongoing work in the area of Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College. Our approach to Cognitive Robotics has been to apply abductive reasoning procedures using the Event Calculus, an extension to First Order Predicate Calculus (FOPC), to provide a unified view of several related mobile robotics tasks: sensor data assimilation, map-building and planning. Cognitive robotics depends on an explicit declarative representation. While this greatly facilitates reasoning about domain knowledge, it comes with an extra computational overhead. This is the basis of the semantic knife-edge, maintaining a delicate balance between expressivity and efficient implementation.