Reasoning and planning for mobile robots is a challenging problem, as the world evolves over time and thus the robot's goals may change. One technique to tackle this problem is goal reasoning, where the agent not only reasons about its actions, but also about which goals to pursue. While goal reasoning for single agents has been researched extensively, distributed, multi-agent goal reasoning comes with additional challenges, especially in a distributed setting. In such a context, some form of coordination is necessary to allow for cooperative behavior. Previous goal reasoning approaches share the agent's world model with the other agents, which already enables basic cooperation. However, the agent's goals, and thus its intentions, are typically not shared. In this paper, we present a method to tackle this limitation. Extending an existing goal reasoning framework, we propose enabling cooperative behavior between multiple agents through promises, where an agent may promise that certain facts will be true at some point in the future. Sharing these promises allows other agents to not only consider the current state of the world, but also the intentions of other agents when deciding on which goal to pursue next. We describe how promises can be incorporated into the goal life cycle, a commonly used goal refinement mechanism. We then show how promises can be used when planning for a particular goal by connecting them to timed initial literals (TILs) from PDDL planning. Finally, we evaluate our prototypical implementation in a simplified logistics scenario.

翻译：移动机器人的理性和规划是一个具有挑战性的问题,因为世界会随着时间而演变,因此机器人的目标可能会发生变化。解决这一问题的一种方法是目标推理,即代理人不仅对其行动有原因,而且还要追求哪些目标。虽然对单一代理人的目标推理进行了广泛研究,分布广泛,多试剂目标推理带来了更多的挑战,特别是在分布式环境中。在这种情况下,需要某种形式的协调来允许合作行为。以往的目标推理方法将代理人的世界模型与其他代理人分享,这已经使基本合作得以进行。然而,代理人的目标,因此其意图,通常不是共享的。在本文件中,我们提出了一个方法来应对这一限制。扩展一个现有目标推理框架,我们建议通过承诺使多个代理人之间能够开展合作,在将来某个时候某些事实将会是真实的。在分享这些承诺时,其他代理人不仅可以考虑世界的现状,而且可以考虑其他代理人在决定下一个目标时的意向。我们描述了如何将承诺纳入目标生命周期中,在将一个共同使用的目标周期中,一个共同使用的目标推算成一个目标推算。