Using logic to handle conflicts between system, component, and infrastructure goals in complex robotic architectures

Complex robots with many interacting components in their control architectures are subject to component failures from which neither the control architecture nor the implementing infrastructure can recover. Moreover, the operating conditions for these components might be at odds with goals the robot might have adopted (e.g., through external commands or in the course of the execution of the current task). We argue that the best (if not the only) way to resolve any difficulties that arise from the different requirements at the agent, component and infrastructure levels is to use a common formal logical goal representation for all three layers. We discuss how these representations can be integrated into a complex robotic architecture and demonstrate in an experimental evaluation on a robot how the architecture can recover from a failure situation that it would not have been able to handle without explicit multi-level unified goal representations and their associated monitoring and reasoning processes.