Interleaving Planning and Robot Execution for Asynchronous User Requests

Karen Zita Haigh and Manuela Veloso,

School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

AAAI-96 Spring symposium ``Planning with Incomplete Information for Robot Problems'', March 1996. Pages 35-44

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 an d 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 replanning to correct failures.

  • Compressed Postscript (11 pages, 204K)
  • Bibtex entry
  • Also see the more recent Autonomous Robots journal article.