Applications of a logic of knowledge to motion planning under uncertainty

Abstract

Inspired by the success of the distributed computing community in applying logics of knowledge and time to reasoning about distributed protocols, we aim for a similarly powerful and high-level abstraction when reasoning about control problems involving uncertainty. This paper concentrates on robot motion planning with uncertainty in both control and sensing, a problem that has already been well studied within the robotics community. First, a new and natural problem in this domain is defined: Does there exists a sound and complete termination condition for a motion, given initial and goal locations? If yes, how to construct it? Then we define a high-level language, a logic of time and knowledge, which we use to reason about termination conditions and to state general conditions for the existence of sound and complete termination conditions in a broad domain. Finally, we show that sound termination conditions that are optimal in a precise sense provide a natural example of knowledge-based programs with multiple implementations.