Reasoning about the Actions of an Intelligent UAV

Erik Sandewall
Linköping university

Abstract

Intelligent UAV:s (unmanned aerial vehicles) are similar in many ways to intelligent ground robots, but there are also some important differences. In particular, whereas obstacle detection and obstacle- related maneuvers are important difficulties in most scenarios for ground robots, they play a relatively minor role for airborne robots. This is one of the reasons why intelligent UAV:s offer an excellent application for artificial intelligence techniques.

The WITAS project at Linköping university (Sweden) combines research in knowledge representation, computer vision, and hardware and support software technologies in a long-term research project on intelligent UAV:s. One branch of the project extends contemporary theories of reasoning about actions and change so that they can be used for the reasoning done by the aerial robot. Necessary extensions include: reasoning about hybrid change (continuous and discrete), reasoning about sensors and actuators, and reasoning that results in goal- directed behavior in the robot itself.

The talk will give a brief overview of the WITAS project as a whole, including its current software base, and will then describe our recent developments in logics for actions and change.


Eyal Amir
Last modified: Thu Oct 15 12:27:54 PDT 1998