רונן ברפמן

We develop a formal tool for representing and analyzing informational aspects of robotic tasks, based on the formal concept of 'knowledge." Specifically, we adopt the notion of knowledge-based protocols from distributed systems, and define the notions of knowledge complexity of a robotic task and knowledge capability of a robot. The resulting formalism naturally captures previous work in the areas of robot information management, but is sufficiently rigorous and natural to allow many extensions. Our goal is to introduce the reader to these ideas, their underlying motivation and intuition, and their possible applications. In particular we demonstrate the application of these tools by analyzing a maze searching domain [BK78, Don94], and discussing their application to task distribution.