A Robot Task Planner that Merges Symbolic and Geometric Reasoning

We have developed an original planner, aSyMov, that has been specially designed to address intricate robot planning problems where geometric constraints cannot be simply "abstracted" in a way that has no influence on the symbolic plan. This paper presents the ingredients that allowed us to establish an effective link between the representations used by a symbolic task planner and the representations used by a realistic motion and manipulation planning library. The architecture and the main plan search strategies are presented together with an illustrative example solved by a prototype implementation of aSyMov. At each step of the planning process both symbolic and geometric constraints are considered. Besides, the planning process tries to arbitrate between finding a plan with the level of knowledge it has already acquired, or "investing" more in a deeper knowledge of the topology of the different configuration spaces it manipulates.

[1]  Pierre Régnier,et al.  Complete Determination of Parallel Actions and Temporal Optimization in Linear Plans of Action , 1991, EWSP.

[2]  Lydia E. Kavraki,et al.  Randomized preprocessing of configuration for fast path planning , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  On multi-arm manipulation planning , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Two manipulation planning algorithms , 1995 .

[5]  Hector Muñoz-Avila,et al.  SHOP: Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner , 1999, IJCAI.

[6]  Fahiem Bacchus,et al.  Using temporal logics to express search control knowledge for planning , 2000, Artif. Intell..

[7]  Thierry Siméon,et al.  Visibility-based probabilistic roadmaps for motion planning , 2000, Adv. Robotics.

[8]  J.-P. Laumond,et al.  Move3D: A generic platform for path planning , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning (ISATP2001). Assembly and Disassembly in the Twenty-first Century. (Cat. No.01TH8560).

[9]  Jörg Hoffmann,et al.  Extending FF to Numerical State Variables , 2002, ECAI.

[10]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Playing with several roadmaps to solve manipulation problems , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  Thierry Siméon,et al.  A probabilistic algorithm for manipulation planning under continuous grasps and placements , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[12]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Overview of aSyMov: Integrating Motion, Manipulation and Task Planning , 2003 .

[13]  Maria Fox,et al.  PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[14]  Rachid Alami,et al.  aSyMov: A Planner That Deals with Intricate Symbolic and Geometric Problems , 2003, ISRR.