The fact that many AI planning approaches are still based on too simplifying assumptions makes it often hard to apply these approaches to real-world robotics. In particular, it is in many cases difficult to generate a complete plan in advance, because not all information is available at the beginning of the planning process. We briefly present the continual planning system ACogPlan and a preliminary test case that demonstrates how the planning system can enable mobile robots to continually plan and execute activities in an open-ended domain.

In this paper we present a full architecture to deploy efficiently a grid in a private cloud approach. We first give details about the resources constraints acquisition. We use Rich Internet Application (RIA) to access and/or modify the resources in a very user-friendly interface. Then, using the previous information, we explain how we can compute a dynamic deployment plan, that can be used either to build an optimal grid of computers or to give information to its scheduler. This plan is computed using pddl solver with various logical constraints obtained from the IT users through the RIA.

Abduction is widely used in the task of plan recognition, since it can be viewed as the task of finding the best explanation for a set of observations. The major drawback of abduction is its computational complexity. The task of abductive reasoning quickly becomes intractable as the background knowledge is increased. Recent efforts in the field of computational linguistics have enriched computational resources for commonsense reasoning. The enriched knowledge base facilitates exploring practical plan recognition models in an open-domain. Therefore, it is essential to develop an efficient framework for such large-scale processing. In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of Weighted abduction. Our framework transforms the problem of explanation finding in Weighted abduction into a linear programming problem. Our experiments showed that our approach efficiently solved problems of plan recognition and outperforms state-of-the-art tool for Weighted abduction.

The use of automated action planning techniques is essential for efficient mission execution of mobile robots. However, a tremendous effort is needed to represent planning problem domains realistically to meet the real-world constraints. Therefore, there is another source of uncertainty for mobile robot systems due to the impossibility of perfectly representing action representations (e.g., preconditions and effects) in all circumstances. When domain representations are not complete, a planner may not be capable of constructing a valid plan for dynamic events even when it is possible. This research focuses on a generic domain update method to construct alternative plans against real-time execution failures which are detected either during runtime or earlier by a plan simulation process. Based on the updated domain representations, a new executable plan is constructed even when the outcomes of existing operators are not completely known in advance or valid plans are not possible with the existing representation of the domain. A failure resolution scenario is given in the realistic Webots simulator with mobile robots. Since TLPlan is used as the base temporal planner, makespan optimization is achieved with the available knowledge of the robots.

Previous work has suggested the use of lexicalized grammars for probabilistic plan recognition. Such grammars allow the domain builder to delay commitment to hypothesizing high level goals in order to reduce computational costs. However this delay has limitations. In the case of only partial observation traces, delaying commitment can prevent such algorithms from forming correct conclusions about some goals. This paper presents a heuristic metric to address this limitation. It advocates computing the maximum change in conditional probability across all the computed explanations given the observations explicitly considering a goal of interest.

In this paper we describe the integration of a robot control platform (Player/Stage) and a real robot (Pioneer P3DX) with PELEA (Planning, Execution and LEarning Architecture). PELEA is a general-purpose planning architecture suitable for a wide range of real world applications, from robotics to emergency management. It allows planning engineers to generate planning applications since it integrates planning, execution, replanning, monitoring and learning capabilities. We also present a relational learning approach for automatically modeling robot-action execution durations, with the purpose of improving the planning process of PELEA by refining domain definitions.

We present our efforts to deploy mobile robots in office environments, focusing in particular on the challenge of planning a schedule for a robot to accomplish user-requested actions. We concretely aim to make our CoBot mobile robots available to execute navigational tasks requested by users, such as telepresence, and picking up and delivering messages or objects at different locations. We contribute an efficient web-based approach in which users can request and schedule the execution of specific tasks. The scheduling problem is converted to a mixed integer programming problem. The robot executes the scheduled tasks using a synthetic speech and touch-screen interface to interact with users, while allowing users to follow the task execution online. Our robot uses a robust Kinect-based safe navigation algorithm, moves fully autonomously without the need to be chaperoned by anyone, and is robust to the presence of moving humans, as well as non-trivial obstacles, such as legged chairs and tables. Our robots have already performed 15km of autonomous service tasks.

In this paper we present a principled planner based approach to the active visual object search problem in unknown environments. We make use of a hierarchical planner that combines the strength of decision theory and heuristics. Furthermore, our object search approach leverages on the conceptual spatial knowledge in the form of object co-occurrences and semantic place categorisation. A hierarchical model for representing object locations is presented with which the planner is able to perform indirect search. Finally we present real world experiments to show the feasibility of the approach.

In this paper, we investigate a novel application of online planning and scheduling:controlling an automated infeeder for a packaging line of foodand consumer packaged goods. In this system, products arrive continuously at high-speedfrom the end of the production line and need to be arranged into a specific configurationfor downstream primary and secondary packaging machines.In collaboration with a domain expert from the packaging industry,we developed an innovative design for a reconfigurable parallel infeed system usinga matrix of interchangeable smart belts. We also adapted our online model-basedPlantrol planner to this domain. Our planner can control various configurations ofthe new infeed system through simulation both in nominal planning and when runtimefailures occur. We are also building a small physical prototype to validate the newdesign and our software framework.

Model update is a formal approach to correct a system model M w.r.t some property not satisfied by M. In this work, we show how this formal approach can be used for plan and planning domain verification and update. While a model checking method can directly be used to perform plan verification, model update techniques can be used to either update an incorrect plan and\or update a planning domain specification. Well known model update approaches are based on CTL — a logic which does not take into account the actions. In previous work, we have proposed the alpha-CTL logic, a logic whose semantics is based on actions. Here, we are proposing a model update system based on alpha-CTL which is able to automatically modify a plan M, generating a new plan M' that satisfies phi or, if there is not such a plan, to automatically update the corresponding planning domain.