Representing and analyzing action plans as networks of concurrent processes

The problem of constructing a plan representation that can deal with the complexity of representing and analyzing robot behavior in uncertain and dynamic environments is addressed. A concurrent-process based representation is developed which represents both the plan (or controller) and the uncertain and dynamic environment in which the plan operates. A methodology is outlined for analyzing the behavior of this interacting system of plan and world. This methodology is illustrated with a mixed-batch example from the domain of robotic kitting. To balance the theoretical work, a description of the implemented robot kitting cell is presented