Acquiring Observation Models Through Reverse Plan Monitoring

We present a general-purpose framework for updating a robot’s observation model within the context of planning and execution. Traditional plan execution relies on monitoring plan step transitions through accurate state observations obtained from sensory data. In order to gather meaningful state data from sensors, tedious and time-consuming calibration methods are often required. To address this problem we introduce Reverse Monitoring, a process of learning an observation model through the use of plans composed of scripted actions. The automatically acquired observation models allow the robot to adapt to changes in the environment and robustly execute arbitrary plans. We have fully implemented the method in our AIBO robots, and our empirical results demonstrate its effectiveness.