Assignment 3

Due Tuesday, April 27th in class.

Before you tackle problems 1-4, you might wish to (but don't need to) read about an actual Mars Rover, Rocky 7. Be careful if you do read this paper, however. The answer to the problems is not in the paper, which might be useful background reading.

A Cognitive Model of Planning

1. Describe how you would use a blackboard system to construct a planning system for a Mars Rover. Your planner should handle the following tasks: navigation, scientific exploration (e.g. drilling core samples, mass spectrometry, ...) and communication. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of questions you should consider:
   • What are the knowledge sources for your planner, and what does each know?
   • What data is maintained on the blackboard?
   • What is your blackboard structure, and how does it relate to your task decomposition?

Elephants Don't Play Chess

2. Describe how you would implement a Mars Rover using a subsumption architecture. What behaviors do you need, and how are they related to one another? What sensors should the rover have and which behaviors use which sensors? How?
3. Compare and contrast your answers to 1 and 2. Which architecture do you think is more appropriate for the planetary exploration task?

What are plans for?

4. Give an example from your life (other than giving directions) of a plan-as-communication. What would this plan look like if it were a plan-as-program? How can your example plan be used by a planner to accomplish the intended task? What does the planner (be it a robot or a person) need to know to make use of your plan-as-communication?
5. Is the distinction between plans-as-programs and plans-as-communication a useful one? Why or why not? Is the distinction more than simply "leaving out details"?