
 
vital role in expressing and enforcing various social 
norms including those regarding human robot 
interaction (Feltovich, 2004) which will be 
increasingly important as robots begin to work along 
side humans.  Semantically-rich policy 
representations like those used in KAoS provide 
expressive power needed for context sensitive policy 
expression and enforcement.  There external nature 
of KAoS policies decouples the constraint 
specification from the underlying robotic 
implementation and as such is more transparent and 
flexible than standard approaches.  
Policies of this type are not well suited for all 
aspects of robot control.  Low level control with real 
time constraints is an example in which policy usage 
would not be appropriate.  Our policies are most 
effectively applied in areas of human interest.  
People do not generally consider the low level 
control aspects when trying to work with a robot, but 
instead focus on the higher level aspects that 
generally do not have such sever real-time 
constraints.  Policy mechanisms do not replace 
sound control theory or robot behavioral schemas, 
but supplement them and provide a much more 
intuitive way for operators to interact with and 
manage multiple robots.  Our goal is to explore the 
conditions under which the use of policy services 
can be most beneficial in promoting effective 
humane-machine interaction.   
REFERENCES 
Allen, J. F., et al 2001. D.K. Byron, M. Dzikovska, G. 
Ferguson, L. Galescu, A. Stent, “Towards 
conversational human-computer interaction”, AI 
Magazine, 22(4), 27-35. 
Bradshaw, J. M., et al, 2004.  “Making agents acceptable 
to people”, Intelligent Technologies for Information 
Analysis: Advances in Agents, Data Mining, and 
Statistical Learning. (pp. 355-400). Berlin: Springer 
Verlag. 
Carvalho, M., et al 2002.  M. R. Breedy, “Supporting 
Flexible Data Feeds in Dynamic Sensor Grids through 
Mobile Agents”, Mobile Agent, pp.171-185. 
Chambers, N., 2005.James Allen, Lucian Galescu, and 
Hyuckchul Jung. A Dialogue-Based Approach to 
Multi-Robot Team Control. In Proceedings 3rd 
International Multi-Robot Systems Workshop. 
Washington, DC. March 14-16. 
Feltovich, P.J., et al 2004.  Bradshaw, J.M., Jeffers, R., 
Suri, N. & Uszok, A.  (2004).  Social order and 
adaptability in animal and human cultures as 
analogues for agent communities:  Toward a policy-
based approach.  In A. Omacini, P. Petta, & J. Pitt 
(Eds.),  Engineering societies for the agents world IV 
(pp.21-48).   Lecture Notes in Computer Science 
Series.  Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag. 
Gerkey, B. et al. 2003. R. T. Vaughan and A. Howard. 
"The Player/Stage Project: Tools for Multi-Robot and 
Distributed Sensor Systems" Proceedings of the 11th 
International Conference on Advanced Robotics, 
pages 317-323, Coimbra, Portugal, June 2003 
Johnson, M., et al, 2003. “KAoS semantic policy and 
domain services: An application of DAML to Web 
services-based grid architectures”, Proceedings of the 
AAMAS 03 Workshop on Web Services and Agent-
Based Engineering, Melbourne, Australia. 
Mataric, M., 2001. “Learning in behavior-based multi-
robot systems: Policies, models, and other agents.” 
Cognitive Systems Research, special issue on 
Multidisciplinary studies of multi-agent learning, 
2(1):81--93, April. 
Sierhuis, M., et al 2003.  W. J. Clancey, and R. v. Hoof, 
"Brahms: a multi-agent modelling environment for 
simulating social phenomena", presented at First 
conference of the European Social Simulation 
Association (SIMSOC VI), Groningen, The 
Netherlands. 
Suri, N. et al, 2003.  “DAML-based policy enforcement 
for semantic data transformation and filtering in multi-
agent systems”, Proceedings of the Autonomous 
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Conference 
Melbourne, Australia, New York, NY: ACM Press. 
Tambe, M. 1997 Towards Flexible Teamwork Journal of 
Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 7, Pages 83-
124. 
Tonti, G. et al, 2003.  “Semantic Web languages for policy 
representation and reasoning: A comparison of KAoS, 
Rei, and Ponder”, International Semantic Web 
Conference, Sanibel Island, Florida. 
Williams, K. 2004. “Summary of Unmanned Aircraft 
Accident/Incident Data: Human Factors Implications”, 
Technical Report. 
Wolff, M., 1999 “The Automation debate revisited: 
Computer Clash”,  Flight Safety Australia, September-
October. 
Yanco, H., 2004.  J. Drury, J. Scholtz, “Beyond Usability 
Evaluation: Analysis of Human-Robot Interaction at a 
Major Robotics Competition”, Journal of Human-
Computer Interaction. 
A SEMANTICALLY RICH POLICY BASED APPROACH TO ROBOT CONTROL
325