High-level planning and low-level execution: towards a complete robotic agent

We have been developing Rogue, an architecture that integrates high-level planning with a low-level executing robotic agent. Rogue is designed as the o ce gofer task planner for Xavier the robot. User requests are interpreted as high-level planning goals, such as getting co ee, and picking up and delivering mail or faxes. Users post tasks asynchronously and Rogue controls the corresponding planning and execution continuous process. This paper presents the extensions to a nonlinear state-space planning algorithm to allow for the interaction to the robot executor. We focus on presenting how executable steps are identi ed based on the planning model and the predicted execution performance; how interrupts from users requests are handled and incorporated into the system; how executable plans are merged according to their priorities; and how monitoring execution can add more perception knowledge to the planning and possible needed re-planning processes. The complete Rogue system will learn from its planning and execution experiences to improve upon its own behaviour with time. We nalize the paper by brie y discussing Rogue's learning opportunities. This research is sponsored in part by the Wright Laboratory, Aeronautical Systems Center, Air Force Material Command, USAF, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under grant number F33615-93-1-1330. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the o cial policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Wright Laboratory or the U. S. Government. c ACM. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for pro t or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior speci c permission and/or a fee.