Submitted Abstract
Today’s service robots have emerging applications in domestic, military, health-care and entertainment domains. These applications, which demand ever increasing levels of intelligence and autonomy, form the challenge of cognitive robotics. This is a branch of robotics that aims at studying and developing robots with reasoning capabilities needed to achieve complex goals in dynamic environments. Such robots require a processing architecture that allows them to perform high-level reasoning and deliberation about their information (i.e., beliefs and knowledge) and objectives (i.e., goals to achieve) in order to decide which actions to perform. Various agent programming languages have been proposed to support the implementation of similar cognitive architectures. However, these programming languages lack necessary supports for the management of a robot’s sensory data and the execution control of its plans. The aim of this research proposal is to address how existing agent programming languages can be extended to deal with the sensory and action components of robotic systems in a systematic and modular way. Such extensions would create powerful programming languages that support the development of intelligent and autonomous robotic systems.