Bimanual and humanoid robots are appealing because of their human-like ability to leverage multiple arms to efficiently complete tasks. However, controlling multiple arms at once is computationally challenging due to the growth in the hybrid discrete-continuous action space. Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) algorithms can efficiently plan in hybrid spaces but generally produce plans, where only one arm is moving at a time, rather than schedules that allow for parallel arm motion. In order to extend TAMP to produce schedules, we present ScheduleStream, the first general-purpose framework for planning & scheduling with sampling operations. ScheduleStream models temporal dynamics using hybrid durative actions, which can be started asynchronously and persist for a duration that's a function of their parameters. We propose domain-independent algorithms that solve ScheduleStream problems without any application-specific mechanisms. We apply ScheduleStream to Task and Motion Planning & Scheduling (TAMPAS), where we use GPU acceleration within samplers to expedite planning. We compare ScheduleStream algorithms to several ablations in simulation and find that they produce more efficient solutions. We demonstrate ScheduleStream on several real-world bimanual robot tasks at https://schedulestream.github.io.

Our healthcare systems are struggling with the ageing population resulting in an increasing demand and rising expenditures while facing a shortage of healthcare professionals at the same time [7, 12]. When a system is under stress and demand exceeds supply, among other strategies, scheduling resources efficiently and planning becomes important [8]. Hospitals are a critical component of the healthcare system, playing a vital role in care coordination, system development, and supporting population health needs [11]. Efficient planning in hospitals is important to utilized the limited resources in the best possible manner. Here approaches from Operations Research can be of benefit to optimize planning problems such as admission planning, bed allocation, nurse scheduling and surgery scheduling [6, 10]. It has been recognized in the past that resources should be planned in an integrated manner to improve the overall outcomes instead of focusing on individual departments or resources [10].

One leading planning lawyer warned such AI services could'supercharge nimbyism'. One leading planning lawyer warned such AI services could'supercharge nimbyism'. Tools that help people scan applications and find grounds for objection have potential to hit government's housebuilding plans The government's plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism. A new service called Objector is offering "policy-backed objections in minutes" to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes. It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as "high", "medium" or "low" impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to "influence councillors".

Abstract--Autonomous navigation in unknown environments requires compact yet expressive spatial understanding under partial observability to support high-level decision making. Existing approaches struggle to balance rich contextual representation with navigation efficiency. We present MacroNav, a learning-based navigation framework featuring two key components: (1) a lightweight context encoder trained via multi-task self-supervised learning to capture multi-scale, navigation-centric spatial representations; and (2) a reinforcement learning policy that seamlessly integrates these representations with graph-based reasoning for efficient action selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the context encoder's efficient and robust environmental understanding. Real-world deployments further validate MacroNav's effectiveness, yielding significant gains over state-of-the-art navigation methods in both Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), while maintaining low computational cost. Code will be released upon acceptance.

This paper addresses a motion planning problem to achieve spatio-temporal-logical tasks, expressed by syntactically co-safe linear temporal logic specifications (scLTL\next), in uncertain environments. Here, the uncertainty is modeled as some probabilistic knowledge on the semantic labels of the environment. For example, the task is "first go to region 1, then go to region 2"; however, the exact locations of regions 1 and 2 are not known a priori, instead a probabilistic belief is available. We propose a novel automata-theoretic approach, where a special product automaton is constructed to capture the uncertainty related to semantic labels, and a reward function is designed for each edge of this product automaton. The proposed algorithm utilizes value iteration for online replanning. We show some theoretical results and present some simulations/experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.

While recent advances in vision-language models have accelerated the development of language-guided robot planners, their black-box nature often lacks safety guarantees and interpretability crucial for real-world deployment. Conversely, classical symbolic planners offer rigorous safety verification but require significant expert knowledge for setup. To bridge the current gap, this paper proposes ViLaIn-TAMP, a hybrid planning framework for enabling verifiable, interpretable, and autonomous robot behaviors. ViLaIn-TAMP comprises three main components: (1) a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn) adapted from previous work that converts multimodal inputs into structured problem specifications, (2) a modular Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) system that grounds these specifications in actionable trajectory sequences through symbolic and geometric constraint reasoning, and (3) a corrective planning (CP) module which receives concrete feedback on failed solution attempts and feed them with constraints back to ViLaIn to refine the specification. We design challenging manipulation tasks in a cooking domain and evaluate our framework. Experimental results demonstrate that ViLaIn-TAMP outperforms a VLM-as-a-planner baseline by 18% in mean success rate, and that adding the CP module boosts mean success rate by 32%.

Abstract-- In this work, we introduce MO-SeGMan, a Multi-Objective Sequential and Guided Manipulation planner for highly constrained rearrangement problems. MO-SeGMan generates object placement sequences that minimize both re-planning per object and robot travel distance while preserving critical dependency structures with a lazy evaluation method. T o address highly cluttered, non-monotone scenarios, we propose a Selective Guided Forward Search (SGFS) that efficiently relocates only critical obstacles and to feasible relocation points. Furthermore, we adopt a refinement method for adaptive subgoal selection to eliminate unnecessary pick-and-place actions, thereby improving overall solution quality. Extensive evaluations on nine benchmark rearrangement tasks demonstrate that MO-SeGMan generates feasible motion plans in all cases, consistently achieving faster solution times and superior solution quality compared to the baselines. These results highlight the robustness and scalability of the proposed framework for complex rearrangement planning problems. Supplementary videos and code are available at: https: //sites.google.com/view/mo-segman/. Rearrangement planning involves generating a feasible motion plan for a robot to move all goal objects to their designated locations.

Long-horizon decision-making with sparse rewards and continuous states and actions remains a fundamental challenge in AI and robotics. Task and motion planning (TAMP) is a model-based framework that addresses this challenge by planning hierarchically with abstract actions (options). These options are manually defined, limiting the agent to behaviors that we as human engineers know how to program (pick, place, move). In this work, we propose Shortcut Learning for Abstract Planning (SLAP), a method that leverages existing TAMP options to automatically discover new ones. Our key idea is to use model-free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn shortcuts in the abstract planning graph induced by the existing options in TAMP. Without any additional assumptions or inputs, shortcut learning leads to shorter solutions than pure planning, and higher task success rates than flat and hierarchical RL. Qualitatively, SLAP discovers dynamic physical improvisations (e.g., slap, wiggle, wipe) that differ significantly from the manually-defined ones. In experiments in four simulated robotic environments, we show that SLAP solves and generalizes to a wide range of tasks, reducing overall plan lengths by over 50% and consistently outperforming planning and RL baselines.

Abstract--In this paper, we propose a non-myopic sensor management algorithm for multi-target tracking, with multiple sensors operating in the same surveillance area. The algorithm is based on multi-Bernoulli filtering and selects the actions that solve a non-myopic minimisation problem, where the cost function is the mean square generalised optimal sub-pattern assignment (GOSPA) error, over a future time window. For tractability, the sensor management algorithm actually uses an upper bound of the GOSPA error and is implemented via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). The sensors have the ability to jointly optimise and select their actions with the considerations of all other sensors in the surveillance area. The benefits of the proposed algorithm are analysed via simulations. ENSOR management can be defined as the dynamic re-tasking of agile sensors to achieve an operational objective [1]. Sensors can be agile in a multitude of ways, from physically repositioning, changing direction or selecting a sensing mode. Myopic sensor management, sometimes called greedy sensor management, optimises the sensor resources for the immediate benefit of the system, not considering the long term effects of the actions being selected now. Non-myopic sensor management operates on the policy of considering these long-term effects of the actions selected now. Whilst it has an increased computational demand, non-myopic planning often produces more desirable results [2], [3].

Most planners ground numeric planning tasks, given in a first-order-like language, into a ground task representation. However, this can lead to an exponential blowup in task representation size, which occurs in practice for hard-to-ground tasks. We extend a state-of-the-art lifted successor generator for classical planning to support numeric precondition applicability. The method enumerates maximum cliques in a substitution consistency graph. Each maximum clique represents a substitution for the variables of the action schema, yielding a ground action. We augment this graph with numeric action preconditions and prove the successor generator is exact under formally specified conditions. When the conditions fail, our generator may list inapplicable ground actions; a final applicability check filters these without affecting completeness. However, this cannot happen in 23 of 25 benchmark domains, and it occurs only in 1 domain. To the authors' knowledge, no other lifted successor generator supports numeric action preconditions. This enables future research on lifted planning for a very rich planning fragment.