Interleaving planning and robot execution for asynchronous user requests

This paper describes ROGUE, an integrated planning and executing robotic agent. ROGUE is designed to be a roving office gopher unit, doing tasks such as picking up & delivering mail and returning & picking up library books, in a setup where users can post tasks for the robot to do. We have been working towards the goal of building a completely autonomous agent which can learn from its experiences and improve upon its own behaviour with time. This paper describes what we have achieved to-date: (1) a system that can generate and execute plans for multiple interacting goals which arrive asynchronously and whose task structure is not known a priori, interrupting and suspending tasks when necessary, and (2) a system which can compensate for minor problems in its domain knowledge, monitoring execution to determine when actions did not achieve expected results, and re-planning to correct failures.

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