ROS-BDI robots: an agent-based approach for programming the behaviour of autonomous robots

The Robotic Operating System (ROS) provides resources that facilitate the development of robots. However, these resources do not provide robots with some features required in complex scenarios, such as goal-oriented behaviour, autonomy, deliberative capabilities, social abilities, and proactivity combined with reactivity. On the other hand, these features are inherent to Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents, whose behaviour results from reasoning over explicit representations of their beliefs (information about the environment), desires (goals to be achieved), and intentions (commitments to those goals). This work addresses the integration between ROS and BDI agents. This integration is addressed both at a conceptual level, where ROS and BDI concepts are aligned, and in a more practical level, where programming tools are presented to program the behaviour of ROS-based robots as BDI agents. The proposal is evaluated through application examples. The results of this work include an integration model and tools to develop these robots.