Determining Mobile Robot Actions which Require Sensor Interaction

In order for a mobile robot to accomplish a non-trivial task, the task must be described in terms of primitive actions of the robot’s actuators. Our contention is that the transformation from the high level description of the task to the primitive actions should be performed primarily at execution time, when knowledge about the environment can be obtained through sensors. We propose to produce the detailed plan of primitive actions by using a collection of low-level planning components that contain domain specific knowledge and knowledge about the available sensors, actuators, and sensor/actuator processing. This collection will perform signal and control processing as well as serve as an interface to high-level planning processes.