Completing Ambiguous Plans in Cognitive Robotics with Delayed Information

Robots equipped with a set of simple action skills should complete complex tasks, defined as the concatenation of a number of those basic abilities. Traditionally, planners have been used to decide skills to be activated, as well as in which sequence, like state machines. Recently, cognitive architectures like SOAR have been proposed to act as the reasoner by selecting which competence the robot should perform, addressing it towards the goal. However, they have been unidirectionally integrated: once the plan is completely designed by the cognitive architecture, it is sent to the robot, but no feedback is provided to the reasoner. Instead, our proposal allows to establish bi-directional communication between the reasoner and the robot. In this form, the reasoner can develop incomplete plans under the assumption that a part of the information to complete the plan for achieving the goal will arrive delayed from the robot's environment as well as the user. Our work develops this bi-directional communication between the SOAR cognitive architecture and the ROS (Robot Operating System) environment, usual in mobile robotics. The proposed architecture has been tested on a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, which acts as mobile robot, in a searching task.