The Logic-Based Subsumption Architecture Project

Investigators Eyal Amir Pedrito Maynard-Reid II Supporting Faculty John McCarthy Yoav Shoham

General information

The LSA is a logic-based AI architecture based on Brooks' subsumption architecture. In this architecture, we axiomatize different layers of control in First-Order Logic (FOL) and use independent theorem provers to derive each layer's outputs given its inputs. We implement the subsumption of lower layers by higher layers using circumscription to make assumptions in lower layers, and nonmonotonically retract them when higher layers draw new conclusions. The semantics of such an approach may be given by Circumscription. At the moment, this project describes four layers designed for the task of robot control and an experiment that empirically shows the feasibility of using fully expressive FOL theorem provers for robot control with our architecture.

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Papers and Publications

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, LiSA: A Robot Driven by Logical Subsumption, Fifth Symposium on the logical formalization of commonsense reasoning, 2001.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Logic-Based Subsumption Architecture: Empirical Evaluation, AAAI Fall Symposium on Parallel Architectures for Cognition, 2000.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Logic-Based Subsumption Architecture, Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1999.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Door Identification, CS223B (Computer Vision) class Project.

Software and Projects

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, LSA Version 2.0, now available. LSA software and logical theories for controlling a mobile robot. This is a tested system for realtime control of a Nomad 200 mobile robot in an office environment. All of the layers are implemented using Mark Stickel's PTTP theorem prover. (November 2001) Also available, is the log of one of our experiments.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Door Identification, CS223B (Computer Vision) class Project.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, LSA Version 1.0, LSA software and logical theories for controlling a mobile robot.

Relevant Resources and Groups

Autonomous Observers in the Robotics Lab at Stanford University and their architecture.

Mark Stickel's theorem prover PTTP

Rodney Brooks's projects and work on the Subsumption Architecture.

Kurt Konolige's small robots and CS224

The Cognitive Robotics group at Toronto.

Murray Shanahan's group, working on robot control using abduction.

Erik Sandewall's group project on Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles.