Equipping robot control programs with first-order probabilistic reasoning capabilities

An autonomous robot system that is to act in a real-world environment is faced with the problem of having to deal with a high degree of both complexity as well as uncertainty. Therefore, robots should be equipped with a knowledge representation system that is able to soundly handle both aspects. In this paper, we thus introduce an architecture that provides a coupling between plan-based robot controllers and a probabilistic knowledge representation system based on recent developments in statistical relational learning, which possesses the required level of expressiveness and generality. We outline possible applications of the corresponding models in the context of robot control, discussing suitable representation formalisms, inference and learning methods as well as transparent extensions of a robot planning language that allow robot control programs to soundly integrate the results of probabilistic inference into their plan generation process.