Here - Agents Lab - University of Nottingham

as well as important non-functional parameters. In particular, attributes maybe used to identify the entity (a specific robot agent or part of it) responsible ofsome perceptual and/or acting process. For instance, the attribute Agent maybe used to represent the name of the robot providing video frames, while theattribute Side may be used to specify to which one of the robotic cameras (leftor right eye) the video corresponds to.Component Plan Model: A plan, describing the means to achieve a goal (itspost-condition), is represented by the component - component plan - implementing(providing) it. A component plan may require a number of service goalsin order to post sub-goals, to perform actions, and also to acquire the informationit needs to achieve its post-condition. For instance, a Navigator componentplan may process the images from a robots camera and control the velocity andthe direction of the robot to drive it safely toward a given location. The samecomponent plan may subscribe to range data from a laser sensor, to account forthe presence of obstacles on its path.Semantic Descriptions: Self -OSGi re-uses the OSGi XML component descriptionsand enriches them with properties guiding its agent-like managementof components’ dependencies and components’ instantiation.As a way of example, the following is part of the XML documents describinga Navigation, a CameraLocalization and a LaserLocalization component plans.In order to clarify its correspondence with the BDI model it represents, eachXML is preceded with a comment in the form e : Ψ ← P where P is the body ofthe plan, e is the event that triggers the plan (the plan’s post-conditions), andΨ is the context for which the plan can be applied (which corresponds to thepreconditions of the plan).GoalNavigation(?Agent) : true ← {achieve(GoalLocalization(?Agent)); ...}75