Belief Revision with Sensing and Fallible Actions

An agent will generally have incomplete and possibly inaccurate knowledge about its environment. In addition, such an agent may receive erroneous information, perhaps in being misinformed about the truth of some formula. In this paper we present a general approach to reasoning about action and belief change in such a setting. An agent may carry out actions, but in some cases may inadvertently execute the wrong one (for example, pushing an unintended button). As well, an agent may sense whether a condition holds, and may revise its beliefs after being told that a formula is true. Our approach is based on an epistemic extension to basic action theories expressed in the situation calculus, augmented by a plausibility relation over situations. This plausibility relation can be thought of as characterising the agent’s overall belief state; as such it keeps track of not just the formulas that the agent believes to hold, but also the plausibility of formulas that it does not believe to hold. The agent’s belief state is updated by suitably modifying the plausibility relation following the execution of an action. We show that our account generalises previous approaches, and fully handles belief revision, sensing, and erroneous actions.