Action-Based Imperative Programming with YAGI

Alexander Ferrein, Gerald Steinbauer, Stavros Vassos

Abstract: Many tasks for autonomous agents or robots are best de- scribed by a specification of the environment and a specifi- cation of the available actions the agent or robot can perform. Combining such a specification with the possibility to imper- atively program a robot or agent is what we call the action- based imperative programming. One of the most successful such approaches is Golog. In this paper, we draft a proposal for a new robot program- ming language YAGI, which is based on the action-based imperative programming paradigm. Our goal is to design a small, portable stand-alone YAGI interpreter. We combine the benefits of a principled domain specification with a clean, small and simple programming language, which does not ex- ploit any side-effects from the implementation language. We discuss general requirements of action-based programming languages and outline YAGI, our action-based language ap- proach which particularly aims at embeddability.