A unified formal description of behavioural and deliberative robotic multi-agent systems

Abstract

Many behavioural (Arkin, 1998) and deliberative (Russell and Norvig, 1995) robot control methods have been developed. Besides investigating task execution by a single robot multi-agent systems are being developed. Unfortunately only some of those control methods have a formal description. To aggravate the situation, those control methods that have formal specifications use different formal means of description. This paper presents an outline of a unified formal description of systems composed of many embodied agents using behavioural or deliberative control methods. Such a description is needed to specify in an implementation independent way the functionality of programming frameworks (Markiewicz and Lucena, 2001). Transition function based approach to the formal description of the above mentioned systems has been assumed to facilitate the future implementation of thus specified programming frameworks. The presented description is a generalization of the formal description used for the specification of MRROC++ (Zieliński, 1999; Zieliński, 2001).