Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Structured reactive communication plans—

Integrating conversational actions into high-level robot control systems

  • Technical Papers-section 4
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
KI-98: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1504))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 220 Accesses

Abstract

Specifying communication routines transparently and explicitly as part of robots’ plans rather than hiding them in separate modules makes robots’ communication behavior more effective, efficient, and robust. It enables robot control systems to generate, reason about and eevise their communication behavior. The controllers can also synchronize the robots’ conversations with other actions and use control structures to make the communication behavior flexible and robust. In this paper, we extend RPL, a reactive plan language, to allow for controlling conversational actions. The additional constructs constitute an interface between RPL and conversational actions that is identical to the interface between RPL and continuous control processes such as navigation. The uniformity of the two interfaces and the control structures provided by RPL enable a programmer to concisely specify a wide spectrum of communication behavior. This paper describes how these extensions are implemented and used by a robot office courier.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. J. L. Austin. How To Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962.

    Google Scholar 

  2. M. Beetz, T. Arbuckle, A. Cremers, and M. Mann. Transparent, flexible, and resource-adaptive image processing for autonomous service robots. In H. Prade, editor, Procs. of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-98), pages 632–636, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  3. M. Beetz and M. Bennewitz. Planning, scheduling, and plan execution for autonomous robot office couriers. In R. Bergmann and A. Kott, editors, Integrating Planning, Scheduling and Execution in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments, volume Workshop Notes 98-02. AAAI Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  4. M. Beetz. Anticipating and Forestalling Execution Failures in Structured Reactive Plans. Technical report, yale/dcs/rr1097, Yale University, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  5. M. Beetz and D. McDermott. Improving robot plans during their execution. In Kris Hammond, editor, Second International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 3–12, Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  6. M. Beetz and D. McDermott. Local planning of ongoing activities. In Brian Drabble, editor, Third International Conference on AI Planning Systems, pages 19–26, Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  7. P. Cohen and H. Levesque. Communicative actions for artificial agents. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, Cambridge, Ma, 1995. AAAI Press.

    Google Scholar 

  8. R. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, and V. Zue. Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology. Cambridge University Press and Giardini, 1997. http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/HLTsurvey/HLTsurvey.html.

    Google Scholar 

  9. P. Cohen and C. Perrault. Elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts. Cognitive Science 3(3):177–212, 1979.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. J. Firby. An investigation into reactive planning in complex domains. In Proc. of AAAI-87, pages 202–206, Seattle, WA, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield Software Agents, chapter KQML as an agent communication language. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  12. K.-P. Gapp. Basic meanings of spatial relations: Computation and evaluation in 3d space. In Proc. of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1393–1398, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  13. E. Gat. Esl: A language for supporting robust plan execution in embedded autonomous agents. In AAAI Fall Symposium: Issues in Plan Execution Cambridge, MA, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  14. K. E. Lochbaum, B. J. Grosz, and C. L. Sidner. Models of plans to support communication: An initial report. In Proc. of AAAI-90, pages 485–490, Boston, MA, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  15. D. McDermott. The duck manual. Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-399, Yale University, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  16. D. McDermott. A reactive plan language. Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-864, Yale University, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Nils J. Nilsson. Shakey the robot. Technical Note 323, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  18. P. Norvig. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  19. F. Pereira and D. Warren. Definite clause grammars for language analysis. In Artificial Intelligence, pages 231–278, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  20. R. Reichman. Plain-speaking: A theory and grammar of spontaneous discourse. PhD thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981.

    Google Scholar 

  21. S. J. Russell and P. Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  22. John R. Searle. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.

    Google Scholar 

  23. E. Stopp, K. Gapp, G. Herzog, T. Lngle, and T., Lth. Utilizing spatial relations for natural language access to an autonomous mobile robot. In B. Nebel and L. Dreschler-Fischer, editors, KI-94: Advances in Artificial Intelligence., pages 39–50, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1994. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Mark C. Torrance and Lynn Andrea Stein. Communicating with martians (and robots). Technical report, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  25. T. Weis. Resource-adaptive action planning in a dialogue system for repair support. In B. Nebel, editor, Proceedings der 21. Deutschen Jahrestagungfr Knstliche Intelligenz, Berlin, New Yor, 1997. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Terry Winograd. Understanding natural language. Cognitive Psychology 3(1), 1972. Reprinted as a book by Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science III, University of Bonn, Roemerstr. 164, D-53117, Bonn, Germany

    Michael Beetz & Hanno Peters

Authors
  1. Michael Beetz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hanno Peters
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Otthein Herzog Andreas Günter

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Beetz, M., Peters, H. (1998). Structured reactive communication plans—. In: Herzog, O., Günter, A. (eds) KI-98: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1504. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095438

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095438

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65080-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49656-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation