Teleo-reactive programs for agent control

  • Authors:
  • Nils J. Nilsson

  • Affiliations:
  • Robotics Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

A formalism is presented for computing and organizing actions for autonomous agents in dynamic environments. We introduce the notion of teleo-reactive (T-R) programs whose execution entails the construction of circuitry for the continuous computation of the parameters and conditions on which agent action is based. In addition to continuous feedback, T-R programs support parameter binding and recursion. A primary difference between T-R programs and many other circuit-based systems is that the circuitry of T-R programs is more compact; it is constructed at run time and thus does not have to anticipate all the contingencies that might arise over all possible runs. In addition, T-R programs are intuitive and easy to write and are written in a form that is compatible with automatic planning and learning methods. We briefly describe some experimental applications of T-R programs in the control of simulated and actual mobile robots.