The ability to understand the goals and plans of other agents is an important characteristic of intelligent behaviours in many contexts. One of the approaches used to endow agents with this capability is the weighted model counting approach. Given a plan library and a sequence of observations, this approach exhaustively enumerates plan execution models that are consistent with the observed behaviour. The probability that the agent might be pursuing a particular goal is then computed as a proportion of plan execution models satisfying the goal. The approach allows to recognize multiple interleaved plans, but suffers from a combinatorial explosion of plan execution models, which impedes its application to real-world domains. This paper presents a heuristic weighted model counting algorithm that limits the number of generated plan execution models in order to recognize goals quickly by computing their lower and upper bound likelihoods.

We investigate the computational complexity of two global constraints, CUMULATIVE and INTERDISTANCE. These are key constraints in modeling and solving scheduling problems. Enforcing domain consistency on both is NP-hard. However, restricted versions of these constraints are often sufficient in practice. Some examples include scheduling problems with a large number of similar tasks, or tasks sparsely distributed over time. Another example is runway sequencing problems in air-traffic control, where landing periods have a regular pattern. Such cases can be characterized in terms of structural restrictions on the constraints. We identify a number of such structural restrictions and investigate how they impact the computational complexity of propagating these global constraints. In particular, we prove that such restrictions often make propagation tractable.

The causal graph of a planning instance is an important tool for planning both in practice and in theory. The theoretical studies of causal graphs have largely analysed the computational complexity of planning for instances where the causal graph has a certain structure, often in combination with other parameters like the domain size of the variables. Chen and Giménez ignored even the structure and considered only the size of the weakly connected components. They proved that planning is tractable if the components are bounded by a constant and otherwise intractable. Their intractability result was, however, conditioned by an assumption from parameterised complexity theory that has no known useful relationship with the standard complexity classes. We approach the same problem from the perspective of standard complexity classes, and prove that planning is NP-hard for classes with unbounded components under an additional restriction we refer to as SP-closed. We then argue that most NP-hardness theorems for causal graphs are difficult to apply and, thus, prove a more general result; even if the component sizes grow slowly and the class is not densely populated with graphs, planning still cannot be tractable unless the polynomial hierachy collapses. Both these results still hold when restricted to the class of acyclic causal graphs. We finally give a partial characterization of the borderline between NP-hard and NP-intermediate classes, giving further insight into the problem.

We present ReAct!, an interactive tool for high-level reasoning for cognitive robotic applications. ReAct! enables robotic researchers to describe robots' actions and change in dynamic domains, without having to know about the syntactic and semantic details of the underlying formalism in advance, and solve planning problems using state-of-the-art automated reasoners, without having to learn about their input/output language or usage. In particular, ReAct! can be used to represent sophisticated dynamic domains that feature concurrency, indirect effects of actions, and state/transition constraints. It allows for embedding externally defined calculations (e.g., checking for collision-free continuous trajectories) into representations of hybrid domains that require a tight integration of (discrete) high-level reasoning with (continuous) geometric reasoning. ReAct! also enables users to solve planning problems that involve complex goals. Such variety of utilities are useful for robotic researchers to work on interesting and challenging domains, ranging from service robotics to cognitive factories. ReAct! provides sample formalizations of some action domains (e.g., multi-agent path planning, Tower of Hanoi), as well as dynamic simulations of plans computed by a state-of-the-art automated reasoner (e.g., a SAT solver or an ASP solver).

We provide a systematic analysis of levels of integration between discrete high-level reasoning and continuous low-level reasoning to address hybrid planning problems in robotics. We identify four distinct strategies for such an integration: (i) low-level checks are done for all possible cases in advance and then this information is used during plan generation, (ii) low-level checks are done exactly when they are needed during the search for a plan, (iii) first all plans are computed and then infeasible ones are filtered, and (iv) by means of replanning, after finding a plan, low-level checks identify whether it is infeasible or not; if it is infeasible, a new plan is computed considering the results of previous lowlevel checks. We perform experiments on hybrid planning problems in robotic manipulation and legged locomotion domains considering these four methods of integration, as well as some of their combinations. We analyze the usefulness of levels of integration in these domains, both from the point of view of computational efficiency (in time and space) and from the point of view of plan quality relative to its feasibility. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each strategy in the light of experimental results and provide some guidelines on choosing proper strategies for a given domain. Keywords: Task planning, geometric reasoning, answer set programming.

In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated with sensing' and `dynamically change their plans when necessary'. We propose the use of a new concept, enabling robots to do these two things, for autonomously controlling mobile robots. We implemented our concept to make two experiments under static/dynamic environments. The results of these experiments show that our idea provides a way to adapt to dynamic changes of the environment in the real world.

We provide a systematic analysis of levels of integration between discrete high-level reasoning and continuous low-level reasoning to address hybrid planning problems in robotics. We identify four distinct strategies for such an integration: (i) low-level checks are done for all possible cases in advance and then this information is used during plan generation, (ii) low-level checks are done exactly when they are needed during the search for a plan, (iii) first all plans are computed and then infeasible ones are filtered, and (iv) by means of replanning, after finding a plan, low-level checks identify whether it is infeasible or not; if it is infeasible, a new plan is computed considering the results of previous low-level checks. We perform experiments on hybrid planning problems in robotic manipulation and legged locomotion domains considering these four methods of integration, as well as some of their combinations. We analyze the usefulness of levels of integration in these domains, both from the point of view of computational efficiency (in time and space) and from the point of view of plan quality relative to its feasibility. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each strategy in the light of experimental results and provide some guidelines on choosing proper strategies for a given domain.

We aim to reduce the burden of programming and deploying autonomous systems to work in concert with people in time-critical domains, such as military field operations and disaster response. Deployment plans for these operations are frequently negotiated on-the-fly by teams of human planners. A human operator then translates the agreed upon plan into machine instructions for the robots. We present an algorithm that reduces this translation burden by inferring the final plan from a processed form of the human team's planning conversation. Our approach combines probabilistic generative modeling with logical plan validation used to compute a highly structured prior over possible plans. This hybrid approach enables us to overcome the challenge of performing inference over the large solution space with only a small amount of noisy data from the team planning session. We validate the algorithm through human subject experimentation and show we are able to infer a human team's final plan with 83% accuracy on average. We also describe a robot demonstration in which two people plan and execute a first-response collaborative task with a PR2 robot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates a logical planning technique within a generative model to perform plan inference.

The increased demand for distributed computations on “big data” has led to solutions such as SCOPE, DryadLINQ, Pig, and Hive, which allow the user to specify queries in an SQL-like language, enriched with sets of user-defined operators. The lack of exact semantics for user-defined operators interferes with the query optimization process, thus putting the burden of suggesting, at least partial, query plans on the user. In an attempt to ease this burden, we propose a formal model that allows for data-parallel program synthesis (DPPS) in a semantically well-defined manner. We show that this model generalizes existing frameworks for data-parallel computation, while providing the flexibility of query plan generation that is currently absent from these frameworks. In particular, we show how existing, off-the-shelf, AI planning tools can be used for solving DPPS tasks.

We report a new method for computing near optimal makespan solutions to multi-robot path planning problem on graphs. Our focus here is with hard instances - those with up to 85% of all graph nodes occupied by robots. Our method yields 100-1000x speedup compared with existing methods. At the same time, our solutions have much smaller and often optimal makespans.