Representing sensing actions: the middle ground revisited
Keith Golden, Daniel S. Weld · 1996
To build effective planning systems, it is crucial to find the right level of representation: too impoverished, and important actions and goals are impossible to express; too expressive, and planning becomes intractable. Within the classical framework, Pednault's adl [ 24 ] provided a happy compromise between the impoverished strips representation and the expensive situation calculus. Among languages handling sensing actions and information goals, there is a similar spectrum of expressiveness. uwl, an extension of strips, can't express goals like "Rename the file paper.tex to kr.tex." Nor can it represent universally quantified goals or effects. At the other extreme are elegant languages [ 22, 21, 17 ] for which effective planners do not exist. In this paper, we combine elements of uwl and adl, to define sadl: a middle-ground representation for sensing actions. Underlying our language are two insights, missing from uwl: 1) Knowledge goals are inherently temporal. 2) Knowledge preco...