Abstract
We report on experiences in the development of hybrid autonomous systems where high-level decisions are made by a rational agent. This rational agent interacts with other sub-systems via an abstraction engine. We describe three systems we have developed using the EASS BDI agent programming language and framework which supports this architecture. As a result of these experiences we recommend changes to the theoretical operational semantics that underpins the EASS framework and present a fourth implementation using the new semantics.
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Notes
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The robotic arm system involves proprietary software developed jointly by the universities of Liverpool, Sheffield and Surrey and National Nuclear Labs. Requests for access to the code or experimental data should be made to Profs Fisher, Veres or Gao.
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Software available from https://github.com/VerifiableAutonomy.
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Particularly since a single command from the reasoning engine can be transformed into a sequence of commands by the abstraction engine.
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We use  : to indicate concatenation of an element to the top of a stack.
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Acknowledgments
The work in this paper was funded by EPSRC grants Reconfigurable Autonomy (EP/J011770/1, EP/J011843/1, EP/J011916/1) and Verifiable Autonomy (EP/L024845/1, EP/L024942/1, EP/L024861/1) and STFC Grant LEGO Rovers Evolution (ST/M002225/1).
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Dennis, L.A. et al. (2016). Agent-Based Autonomous Systems and Abstraction Engines: Theory Meets Practice. In: Alboul, L., Damian, D., Aitken, J. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9716. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40379-3_8
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