Forthcoming book on TR extensions

“Keith Clark and Peter Robinson have developed an expanded and practical version of a TR programming system. What’s more, they have written a book about it — to be published sometime next year by Springer.  They have agreed to put a few chapters on this Web page.  As they say in their Preface, “This book shows the reader how to construct multi-threaded robotic agent software systems using two high level logic based programming languages, TeleoR and QuLog. It focuses on how an agent, controlling one or more independently useable robotic resources, for example several robotic arms, can concurrently achieve the goals of multiple tasks.”  I look forward to future systems using their TeleoR and QuLog languages to implement teleo-reactive robots and other intelligent agents”. Nils Nilsson (July, 15th 2014)

Here are five chapters of the book “Programming Co-operating Robotic Agents: A Teleo-Reactive Rule Based Approach” which will be published by Springer. The five chapters are an introduction to Teleo-Reactive programming using the rule form and actions originally proposed by Nils Nilsson.  One difference is that TeleoR language of the book is typed and higher order, another is that it uses a more expressive typed and higher order logic and functional language QuLog for the rule guard queries to the agent’s Belief Store.  QuLog is described in Chapter 3. Chapter 5 is a formal state transition semantics for his language. The rest of the book is about further extensions we have made to the original proposed language. Here is the Bibliography for the entire book at the moment. We provide it as readers of the five sample chapters may want to look up books and papers to which they refer.

We hope you enjoy reading these chapters. Linked software that will enable you to write TeleoR+QuLog programs will be available via a link from these TR pages in the coming weeks.

Please give us comments and suggestions for improvement of both the book chapters and the software.

We thank Ronan Nugent, Springer Senior Editor, for permission to make the first six chapters of the book freely available.

Keith Clark (klc at imperial.ac.uk) and Peter Robinson (pjr at itee.uq.edu.au)

(December, 11th 2016)