Planning and knowledge representation for softbots

摘要

Planning and Knowledge Representation for Softbots by Keith Golden Chairperson of Supervisory Committee: Professor Dan Weld Computer Science and Engineering This thesis describes the design of a planner and knowledge representation languages for building software agents, known as softbots. While the focus of this thesis is on softbots, the ideas and algorithms presented here are general-purpose and could be applied to robotic domains as well. The major contributions are: ffl The lcw (Local Closed World) knowledge representation, used to capture an agent's incomplete information about the world, which can include localized closure information, such as knowledge of all files in a directory. We present lcw inference and update procedures that are sound, fast and effective. ffl The sadl action language, used to describe actions and goals available to the agent, including sensing actions and goals of acquiring new information. We define the semantics for sadl and we illustrate the exp...