Knowledge, action, and ability in the situation calculus: extended abstract

The Cognitive Robotics group at the University of Toronto has been studying various aspects of the reasoning and representation problems involving action and change. The setting is that of a (currently simulated) autonomous robot for which we wish to provide high-level control. One problem that has been a central focus of this work is the <i>frame problem</i> [5]. Recently, Reiter, building on the work of Shubert, Haas and Pednault, has proposed a simple solution to this problem in the context of the situation calculus [7]. <i>In the talk, I will briefly review the situation calculus, Reiter's solution to the frame problem, and the regression method he proposes for reasoning about the effect of actions.</i> Effort is now underway to generalize this solution along a number of dimensions.