Assembly and task planning: a taxonomy

After over two decades of research in the field of assembly and task planning, an IEEE Technical Committee on Assembly and Task Planning has been created. One of the first activities of this committee has been to develop a taxonomy of the field. We will now present this taxonomy, which should be viewed as a dynamic description of the field that will change shape as the field progresses. The reasons for developing such a taxonomy are many: to aid in building a coherent picture of the field which is particularly useful to newcomers to assembly and task planning, to help active researchers better understand how their work relates to the rest of the field. Finally such a taxonomy is useful for administrative purposes such as aiding program committee members and editors in selecting reviewers and as an aid in selecting keywords to be associated with various articles. To further aid the reader of this taxonomy, we have incorporated into it an extensive, but by no means complete, bibliography.<<ETX>>