A dynamic logic for acting, sensing, and planning

This paper is a first attempt towards a theory for reactive planning systems, i.e. systems able to plan and control execution of plans in a partially known and unpredictable environment. We start from an experimental real-world application developed at IRST, discuss some of the fundamental requirements and propose a formal theory based on these requirements. The theory takes into account the following facts: (1) actions may fail, since they correspond to complex programs controlling sensors and actuators which have to work in an unpredictable environment; (2) actions need to acquire information from the real world by activating sensors and actuators; (3) actions need to generate and execute plans of actions, since the planner needs to activate different special-purpose planners and to execute the resulting plans.