Event-processing in Autonomous Robot Programming

When implementing the high-level control component of an autonomous robot, one needs to process events, generated by sensory components, to extract the information relevant to the control component. This paper discusses the lack of support for event-processing when current agent programming languages (APLs) are used to implement the control component of autonomous robots. To address this issue, the use of information flow processing (IFP) systems is proposed to support the development of event-processing components (EPCs) for an autonomous robot. The necessary interaction mechanisms between a control component and EPCs are defined. These mechanisms allow run-time subscription to events of interest, asynchronous reception of events, maintaining necessary histories of events and run-time querying of the histories. Several implementation-related concerns for these interaction mechanisms are discussed.