This presentation by Samuel Wintermute from the AGI-09 conference on artificial general intelligence presents an approach for integrating action in the world with general symbolic reasoning.

Instead of working with task-specific symbolic abstractions of continuous space, our system mediates action through a simple spatial representation. Low-level action controllers work in the context of this representation, and a high-level symbolic system has access to it.

By allowing actions to be spatially simulated, general reasoning about action is possible. Only very simple task-independent symbolic abstractions of space are necessary, and controllers can be used without the need for symbolic characterization of their behavior.

We draw parallels between this system and a modern robotic motion planning algorithm, RRT. This algorithm is instantiated in our system, and serves as a case study showing how the architecture can effectively address real robotics problems.