No abstract

Future intelligent construction machines must harness considerable knowledge to plan and control autonomous tasks in spite of the fact that they will be limited in their own pre-defined knowledge. This paper first describes the need to discover and formulate a general core of theory and software for such machines so that they can access and communicate with knowledge sources in their environment. It next describes current research to simulate characteristics of the knowledge environment for robot agents. An example will illustrate an early implementation effort that uses object-oriented programming for such a simulation. This research will provide a theoretical base for the knowledge environment to sustain automation research for autonomous robots working in real and very challenging field conditions.