Integrating a temporal planner with a path planner for a mobile robot

General planners enable to describe unrestricted classes of planning problems, but have the drawback of being relatively slow when compared to the performance of domain-specific planners within their domains. This slowness proves to be a major handicap when faced with planning and executing in a real world environment. In order to overcome this, we have investigated the idea of using domain-specific planners to assist a general one. We have tested this concept by integrating the general planner IxTET with a path-finding planner. In our examples, where there are many movements to be planned, the benefits thus obtained are significant. In order to achieve the integration of the two planners, we have exploited IxrI-ET’s use of an abstraction hierarchy, which enables us to control the planning system formed by the two planners.