The State Transition Diagram with Path Priority and its applications

Abstract

The overall software structure of the Naval Postgraduate School Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (NPS) AUV) is the Rational Behavior Model (RBM), a tri-level, multilingual software architecture which is based on three levels of abstraction called the Strategic, Tactical, and Execution level. In this study, interests were focussed on the implementation of the Strategic level in CLIPS such that it exhibits the same behavior as the already existing implementation written in Prolog. As a tool for translating a backward chaining version of the Strategic level software (like Prolog) to a forward chaining one (like CLIPS), the State Transition Diagram With Path Priority (STDWP) was introduced in this study. Specifically, STDWP allows graphical translation between backward and forward chaining versions of the Strategic level. This research shows empirically that the translation is always possible and that the two versions hold logical and behavioral equivalence. Thus, STDWP bridges two approaches in robot control which are based on forward and backward chaining.