This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-oc...

For autonomous artificial decision-makers to solve realistic tasks, they need to deal with searching through large state and action spaces under time pressure. We study the problem of planning in such domains and show how structured representations of the environment’s dynamics can help partition the action space into a set of equivalence classes at run time. The partitioned action space is the...

SAUSAGES stands for System for Autonomous Specification, Acquisition, Generation, and Execution of Schemata. SAUSAGES provides a framework for specifying, running, monitoring, and altering plans for mobile robots, and is ideal for building complex real-time systems that need to operate outdoors. SAUSAGES bridges the gap between planning and action, between the world of symbols and propositions ...

Robot behaviors are often designed using a set of states, with transition conditions among them, i.e. a finite state machine. The transition conditions often depend on uncertain inputs. Thus, transitions could fire incorrectly or fail to fire. This necessitates complicating the behavior design with additional transitions to “back out” of states judged to be erroneous. Current robotic systems ma...

The problem of planning in a world can be seen as the problem of determining a sequence of world changes which allows to reach a goal state from a given initial state, each world change being caused by an action. We present here a planning system which is constructed on a logical action formalism, where actions are pairs of formulas (precondition, result). The precondition describes what has to...

Four experiments investigated activation of semantic information in action preparation. Participants either prepared to grasp and use an object (e.g., to drink from a cup) or to lift a finger in association with the object's position following a go/no-go lexical-decision task. Word stimuli were consistent to the action goals of the object use (Experiment 1) or to the finger lifting (Experiment ...

In this chapter, we use the generic term planning to encompass both planning and scheduling problems, and the terms planner or planning system to refer to software for planning or scheduling. Planning is concerned with reasoning about the consequences of acting in order to choose from among a set of possible courses of action. In the simplest case, a planner might enumerate a set of possible co...

This paper proposes a novel method to schedule parallel execution of planning and action of a mobile robot. The method considers the following two types of parallelism. (1) acting while planning: if a partial planning result can be used to determine feasible actions, such actions can be executed while the planning process is still going. (2) planning while acting: if the result of the current a...

OBJECTIVES This study investigates the joint role of coping planning and action control as volitional predictors of changes in the daily consumption of fruit and vegetables. DESIGN In a longitudinal online survey, 203 participants completed assessments at baseline (Time 1), 1 week (Time 2), and 2 weeks later (Time 3). METHODS Structural equation modelling was used to test a series of three ...