Recent years have seen significant technical progress on robot planning, enabling robots to compute actions and motions to accomplish challenging tasks involving driving, flying, walking, or manipulating objects. However, robots that have been commercially deployed in the real world typically have no or minimal planning capability. These robots are often manually programmed, teleoperated, or programmed to follow simple rules. Although these robots are highly successful in their respective niches, a lack of planning capabilities limits the range of tasks for which currently deployed robots can be used. In this article, we highlight key conclusions from a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation in October 2013 that summarize opportunities and key challenges in robot planning and include challenge problems identified in the workshop that can help guide future research towards making robot planning more deployable in the real world.

The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). Bresina presents an approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity-planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, the LADEE activity scheduling system (LASS). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft's orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution. In our second article, Helping Novices Avoid the Hazards of Data: Leveraging Ontologies to Improve Model Generalization Automatically with Online Data Source, Sasin Janpuangtong and Dylan Shell describe an emerging application of an endto-end learning framework for large-scale data analytics that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model-building process.

This article describes a challenging, real-world planning problem within the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). I present the approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, called LASS (LADEE Activity Scheduling System). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft’s orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution.

Some people finish a marathon, or climb Mt. Whitney, or get down to a certain weight, and that's it. They view that particular challenge as a sort of bucket-list accomplishment, and when they cross that finish line, they all but cross out fitness as a priority in their lives. They stop doing the things that helped them attain their goal and revert to poor habits. Soon enough, they're out of shape again (or have gained back all the weight).

On the app's home page (above), Google has replaced the single activity dial graph with individual cards and dials for each goal, showing what you've done and how days you have left to meet it. Scrolling down will reveal a chart of your weight, recent workouts (complete with a map), and more (below). Hitting the floating action " " button lets you set new goals, log your weight, add an activity and more. As for the new goals, you can now get a lot more specific than before. It has more activities and more specific metrics, like steps, duration or times per week, day or month.

Recent work has shown how to improve delete relaxation heuristics by computing relaxed plans, i.e., the hFF heuristic, in a compiled planning task PiC which represents a given set C of fact conjunctions explicitly. While this compilation view of such partial delete relaxation is simple and elegant, its meaning with respect to the original planning task is opaque, and the size of PiC grows exponentially in |C|. We herein provide a direct characterization, without compilation, making explicit how the approach arises from a combination of the delete-relaxation with critical-path heuristics. Designing equations characterizing a novel view on h+ on the one hand, and a generalized version hC of hm on the other hand, we show that h+(PiC) can be characterized in terms of a combined hcplus equation. This naturally generalizes the standard delete-relaxation framework: understanding that framework as a relaxation over singleton facts as atomic subgoals, one can refine the relaxation by using the conjunctions C as atomic subgoals instead. Thanks to this explicit view, we identify the precise source of complexity in hFF(PiC), namely maximization of sets of supported atomic subgoals during relaxed plan extraction, which is easy for singleton-fact subgoals but is NP-complete in the general case. Approximating that problem greedily, we obtain a polynomial-time hCFF version of hFF(PiC), superseding the PiC compilation, and superseding the modified PiCce compilation which achieves the same complexity reduction but at an information loss. Experiments on IPC benchmarks show that these theoretical advantages can translate into empirical ones.

If a change is needed, it is of a different kind. The process through which students may petition for loan forgiveness may need to be streamlined and made clearer. If it acts at all, the Department of Education should redefine the current process and better communicate its availability to students. The new initiative, even if that is not its intention, has the potential to go too far because those who feed off society's productive activities – because that's where the money is – will take it there. They will find ways to expand on language so vague its inevitably loose interpretation leaves public and private universities vulnerable to countless claims that are without merit.

As robotic technologies continue to advance, along with related technologies such as speech and image recognition, memory and analytics, and virtual and augmented reality, better, faster, and cheaper robots will emerge. These machines – sophisticated, discerning, and increasingly autonomous – are certain to have an impact on business and society. But will they bring job displacement and danger or create new categories of employment and protect humankind? We talked to SAP's Kai Goerlich, along with Doug Stephen of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and Brett Kennedy from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the advances we can expect in robotics, robots' limitations, and their likely impact on the world. Kai Goerlich: Several trends will come together to drive the robotics market in the next 15 to 20 years.

- An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) needs to possess a certain degree of autonomy for any particular underwater mission to fulfil the mission objectives successfully and ensure its safety in all stages of the mission in a large scale operating fi e ld . In this paper, a novel combinatorial conflict - free - task ass ignment strategy consisting of an interactive engagement of a local path planner and an adaptive global route planner, is introduced. The method takes advantage of the heuristic search potency of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to address t he discrete nature of routing - task assignment approach and the complexity of NP - hard path planning problem. The proposed hybrid method, is highly efficient as a consequence of its reactive guidance framework that guarantees successful completion of mission s particularly in cluttered environments. To examine the performance of the method in a context of mission productivity, mission time management and vehicle safety, a series of simulation studies are undertaken. The results of simulations declare that the proposed method is reliable and robust, particularly in dealing with uncertainties, and it can significantly enhance the level of a vehicle's autonomy by relying on its reactive nature and capability of providing fast feasible solutions.

The Cooperative Path Planning (CPP) problem seeks to determine a path for a group of robots which form temporary teams to perform tasks. The multi-scale effects of simultaneously coordinating many robots distributed across the workspace while also tightly coordinating the members of teams increases the difficulty of planning. Previous research produced the Constraint Manifold Subsearch (CMS) algorithm that can find minimal length paths to the CPP problem. However, CMS as currently formulated cannot handle more general cost functions, such as minimizing energy expenditure, and cannot handle task schedules that require multiple input teams to merge to form a set of multiple output teams. Furthermore, as CMS must couple planning for all interacting teams, it does not scale well to very large environments. In this paper, we rederive the CMS algorithm using a task graph to reason about inter-team dependencies, allowing the use of more general cost functions and task schedules. We then introduce the recursive CMS (rCMS) algorithm that exploits the reformulation to split the CPP into independent subproblems, significantly reducing computational complexity. Simulation studies show that rCMS can solve substantially larger problems than CMS.