Narrative based Postdictive Reasoning for Cognitive Robotics

Abstract

Making sense of incomplete and conflicting narrative knowledge in the presence of abnormalities, unobservable processes, and other real world considerations is a challenge and crucial requirement for cognitive robotics systems. An added challenge, even when suitably specialised action languages and reasoning systems exist, is practical integration and application within large-scale robot control frameworks. In the backdrop of an autonomous wheelchair robot control task, we report on application-driven work to realise postdiction triggered abnormality detection and re-planning for real-time robot control: (a) Narrative-based knowledge about the environment is obtained via a larger smart environment framework; and (b) abnormalities are postdicted from stablemodels of an answer-set program corresponding to the robot's epistemic model. The overall reasoning is performed in the context of an approximate epistemic action theory based planner implemented via a translation to answer-set programming.1 This paper does not directly address spatial representation and reasoning. Instead, the focus here is on action and change.