Propositional Temporal Logic for planning in an embedded Concurrent Autonomous Agent

In this paper, a Propositional Temporal Logic (PTL) inference engine is implemented in the cognitive level of a Concurrent Autonomous Agent (CAA). The hardware architecture of the system is an embedded microcontrollers network designed to fit the concurrency requirements of the cognitive model of the aforementioned agent. The architecture of the agent comprises three levels, namely, the reactive level, instinctive level and the cognitive level, which runs concurrently. The reactive level is embedded in a PSoC 5LP, consisting of behaviours created over a embedded kinematic controller. The instinctive level runs in an ARM mbed, which receives perceptions from and sends the active behaviour to the reactive level through a CAN bus. This level uses a Knowledge Based System (KBS) with First Order Logic (FOL) as automatic reasoning mechanism. The cognitive level runs an implementation of the METATEM algorithm on a DNP/2486 which, in turn, receives symbolic information from the instinctive level to update its logical world model. It also sends new local goals to instinctive level through an Ethernet network. Finally, the architecture used in the experiments is presented, followed by the results.