Grounding Mundane Inference in Perception

We describe a uniform technique for representing both sensory data and the attentional state of an agent using a subset of modal logic with indexicals. The resulting representation maps naturally into feed-forward parallel networks or can be implemented on stock hardware using bit-mask instructions. The representation has "circuit-semantics" (Nilsson, 1994, Rosenschein and Kaelbling, 1986), but can efficiently represent propositions containing modals, unary predicates, and functions. We describe an example using Kludge, a vision-based mobile robot programmed to perform simple natural language instructions involving fetching and following tasks.