A planning language for embedded systems

Recent research in planning is more and more focusing on planning systems working in \real world" domains. These systems need to act in, sense and represent the real world. Furthermore, no action, even if apparently simple, is guaranteed to succeed and, therefore, no planning can be \sound" (with respect to the real world) without taking into account possible failures. This is mainly due to the intrinsic complexity of reality. A planning language is therefore required to represent explicitly failures, sensing tasks, planning tasks, and task combinations. In this paper, we propose a planning language (called L) which addresses the above features. L allows representing the basic planning activities, the control structures and the basic operations to deal with failures. As a consequence, a uniform representation is used to describe both acting/sensing in the external world and basic planning activities. In this paper, we give the syntax and the semantics of L. Furthermore we also give some examples from an application (the project MAIA) which uses L as planning language. 2