Abstract
To achieve any meaningful tasks, a robot needs some form of task-level executive which acquires knowledge, reasons or plans, and performs and monitors actions. A formal approach for such agent programming is the Golog agent programming language. Golog is based on a first-order logic representation, and a drawback of common implementations is that in order to program agents, also knowledge of Prolog functionality is typically needed. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation of YAGI, a language rooted in Golog that offers a practical subset of the rich Golog framework in a more familiar syntax. Bridging imperative-style programming with an action-based specification, YAGI is more accessible to developers and provides a better ground for robot task-level executives. Moreover, we developed bindings for popular robotics frameworks such as ROS and Fawkes. As a proof of concept we present a YAGI-based agent for the RoboCup Logistics League which shows the expressiveness and the possibility to easily embed YAGI into robot applications.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ferrein, A., Steinbauer, G., Vassos, S.: Action-based imperative programming with YAGI. In: Cognitive Robtics Workshop. AAAI Press (2012)
Ferrein, A., Lakemeyer, G.: Logic-based robot control in highly dynamic domains. J. Robot. Auton. Syst. 56(11), 980–991 (2008)
Ferrein, A., Niemueller, T., Schiffer, S., Lakemeyer, G.: Lessons learnt from developing the embodied AI platform CAESAR for domestic service robotics. In: Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium. AAAI Technical Report, vol. SS-13-04. AAAI (2013)
Ferrein, A., Steinbauer, G.: On the way to high-level programming for resource-limited embedded systems with Golog. In: Ando, N., Balakirsky, S., Hemker, T., Reggiani, M., von Stryk, O. (eds.) SIMPAR 2010. LNCS, vol. 6472, pp. 229–240. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Fox, M., Long, D.: PDDL2. 1: an extension to PDDL for expressing temporal planning domains. J. Artif. Intell. Res. (JAIR) 20, 61–124 (2003)
Giacomo, G.D., Lespérance, Y., Levesque, H.J., Sardina, S.: IndiGolog: a high-level programming language for embedded reasoning agents. In: Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Tools and Applications. Springer, US (2009)
Giacomo, G.D., Palatta, F.: Exploiting a relational DBMS for reasoning about actions. In: Cognitive Robotics Workshop (2000)
Hindriks, K., de Boer, F., van der Hoek, W., Meyer, J.J.: Agent programming in 3APL. Auton. Agent. Multi-Agent Syst. 4(2), 357–401 (1999)
Ingrand, F., Chatila, R., Alami, R., Robert, F.: PRS: a high level supervision and control language for autonomous mobile robots. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), vol. 1 (1996)
Kitano, H., Asada, M., Kuniyoshi, Y., Noda, I., Osawa, E.: RoboCup: the robot world cup initiative. In: Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents (1997)
Levesque, H.J., Reiter, R., Lespérance, Y., Lin, F., Scherl, R.B.: Golog: a logic programming language for dynamic domains. J. Logic Program. 31(1–3), 59–83 (1997)
Levesque, H., Pagnucco, M.: LeGolog: inexpensive experiments in cognitive robotics. In: Cognitive Robotics Workshop (2000)
Loetzsch, M., Risler, M., Jungel, M.: XABSL - a pragmatic approach to behavior engineering. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2006)
Maier, C.: YAGI - An Easy and Light-Weighted Action-Programming Language for Education and Research in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Master’s thesis, Faculty of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology (2015)
Niemueller, T., Ewert, D., Reuter, S., Ferrein, A., Jeschke, S., Lakemeyer, G.: RoboCup logistics league sponsored by festo: a competitive factory automation testbed. In: Behnke, S., Veloso, M., Visser, A., Xiong, R. (eds.) RoboCup 2013. LNCS, vol. 8371, pp. 336–347. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Niemueller, T., Ferrein, A., Beck, D., Lakemeyer, G.: Design principles of the component-based robot software framework fawkes. In: Ando, N., Balakirsky, S., Hemker, T., Reggiani, M., von Stryk, O. (eds.) SIMPAR 2010. LNCS, vol. 6472, pp. 300–311. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Niemüller, T., Ferrein, A., Lakemeyer, G.: A lua-based behavior engine for controlling the humanoid robot nao. In: Baltes, J., Lagoudakis, M.G., Naruse, T., Ghidary, S.S. (eds.) RoboCup 2009. LNCS, vol. 5949, pp. 240–251. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Niemueller, T., Lakemeyer, G., Ferrein, A.: Incremental task-level reasoning in a competitive factory automation scenario. In: Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium 2013 - Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI (2013)
Niemueller, T., Lakemeyer, G., Ferrein, A.: The RoboCup logistics league as a benchmark for planning in robotics. In: Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob) at ICAPS-15 Scheduling (ICAPS) (2015)
Quigley, M., Conley, K., Gerkey, B.P., Faust, J., Foote, T., Leibs, J., Wheeler, R., Ng, A.Y.: ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System. In: ICRA Workshop on Open Source Software (2009)
Reiter, R.: Knowledge in Action. Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)
Sacerdoti, E.: Planning in a hierarchy of abstraction spaces. Artif. Intell. 5(2), 115–135 (1974)
Zwilling, F., Niemueller, T., Lakemeyer, G.: Simulation for the RoboCup logistics league with real-world environment agency and multi-level abstraction. In: Bianchi, R.A.C., Akin, H.L., Ramamoorthy, S., Sugiura, K. (eds.) RoboCup 2014. LNCS, vol. 8992, pp. 220–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2015)
Acknowledgments
T. Niemueller was supported by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) research unit FOR 1513 on Hybrid Reasoning for Intelligent Systems (http://www.hybrid-reasoning.org). C. Mühlbacher was supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) with the grant Guaranteeing Service Robot Dependability During the Entire Life Cycle (GUARD). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ferrein, A., Maier, C., Mühlbacher, C., Niemueller, T., Steinbauer, G., Vassos, S. (2016). Controlling Logistics Robots with the Action-Based Language YAGI. In: Kubota, N., Kiguchi, K., Liu, H., Obo, T. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9834. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43506-0_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43506-0_46
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43505-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-43506-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)