-- Safe and efficient path planning in parking scenarios presents a significant challenge due to the presence of cluttered environments filled with static and dynamic obstacles. T o address this, we propose a novel and computationally efficient planning strategy that seamlessly integrates the predictions of dynamic obstacles into the planning process, ensuring the generation of collision-free paths. Our approach builds upon the conventional Hybrid A star algorithm by introducing a time-indexed variant that explicitly accounts for the predictions of dynamic obstacles during node exploration in the graph, thus enabling dynamic obstacle avoidance. We integrate the time-indexed Hybrid A star algorithm within an online planning framework to compute local paths at each planning step, guided by an adaptively chosen intermediate goal. The proposed method is validated in diverse parking scenarios, including perpendicular, angled, and parallel parking. Through simulations, we showcase our approach's potential in greatly improving the efficiency and safety when compared to the state of the art spline-based planning method for parking situations. I. INTRODUCTION (Semi)autonomous parking addresses the growing demand for efficient and safe vehicle maneuvering in constrained environments [1], [2]. Urbanization and increased vehicle traffic have resulted in congested parking lots, necessitating precise, collision-free navigation.

Most popular and effective approaches to online solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs, Kaelbling et al. (1998)), e.g., Partially Observable Monte Carlo Planning (POMCP) by Silver and Veness (2010) and Determinized Sparse Partially Observable Tree (DESPOT) by Ye et al. (2017), rely on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). These approaches are based on online simulations performed in a simulation environment (i.e. a black-box twin of the real POMDP environment) and estimate the value of actions. However, they require domain-specific policy heuristics, suggesting best actions at each state, for efficient exploration. Macro-actions (He et al. (2011); Bertolucci et al. (2021)) are popular policy heuristics that are particularly efficient for long planning horizons. A macro-action is essentially a sequence of suggested actions from a given state that can effectively guide the simulation phase towards actions with high utilities. However, such heuristics are heavily dependent on domain features and are typically handcrafted for each specific domain. Defining these heuristics is an arduous process that requires significant domain knowledge, especially in complex domains. An alternative approach, like the one by Cai and Hsu (2022), is to learn such heuristics via neural networks, which are, however, uninterpretable and data-inefficient. This paper extends the methodology proposed by Meli et al. (2024) to the learning, via Inductive Logic Programming (ILP, Muggleton (1991)), of Event Calculus (EC) theories C. Veronese, D. Meli & A. Farinelli.

Autonomous long-horizon mobile manipulation encompasses a multitude of challenges, including scene dynamics, unexplored areas, and error recovery. Recent works have leveraged foundation models for scene-level robotic reasoning and planning. However, the performance of these methods degrades when dealing with a large number of objects and large-scale environments. To address these limitations, we propose MORE, a novel approach for enhancing the capabilities of language models to solve zero-shot mobile manipulation planning for rearrangement tasks. MORE leverages scene graphs to represent environments, incorporates instance differentiation, and introduces an active filtering scheme that extracts task-relevant subgraphs of object and region instances. These steps yield a bounded planning problem, effectively mitigating hallucinations and improving reliability. Additionally, we introduce several enhancements that enable planning across both indoor and outdoor environments. We evaluate MORE on 81 diverse rearrangement tasks from the BEHAVIOR-1K benchmark, where it becomes the first approach to successfully solve a significant share of the benchmark, outperforming recent foundation model-based approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capabilities of our approach in several complex real-world tasks, mimicking everyday activities. We make the code publicly available at https://more-model.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Ensuring the safe and efficient operation of CAVs relies heavily on the software framework used. A software framework needs to ensure real-time properties, reliable communication, and efficient resource utilization. Furthermore, a software framework needs to enable seamless transition between testing stages, from simulation to small-scale to full-scale experiments. In this paper, we survey prominent software frameworks used for in-vehicle and inter-vehicle communication in CAVs. We analyze these frameworks regarding opportunities and challenges, such as their real-time properties and transitioning capabilities. Additionally, we delve into the tooling requirements necessary for addressing the associated challenges. We illustrate the practical implications of these challenges through case studies focusing on critical areas such as perception, motion planning, and control. Furthermore, we identify research gaps in the field, highlighting areas where further investigation is needed to advance the development and deployment of safe and efficient CAV systems.

Motivated by the requirements for effectiveness and efficiency, path-speed decomposition-based trajectory planning methods have widely been adopted for autonomous driving applications. While a global route can be pre-computed offline, real-time generation of adaptive local paths remains crucial. Therefore, we present the Frenet Corridor Planner (FCP), an optimization-based local path planning strategy for autonomous driving that ensures smooth and safe navigation around obstacles. Modeling the vehicles as safety-augmented bounding boxes and pedestrians as convex hulls in the Frenet space, our approach defines a drivable corridor by determining the appropriate deviation side for static obstacles. Thereafter, a modified space-domain bicycle kinematics model enables path optimization for smoothness, boundary clearance, and dynamic obstacle risk minimization. The optimized path is then passed to a speed planner to generate the final trajectory. We validate FCP through extensive simulations and real-world hardware experiments, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

We introduce lower-bound certificates for classical planning tasks, which can be used to prove the unsolvability of a task or the optimality of a plan in a way that can be verified by an independent third party. We describe a general framework for generating lower-bound certificates based on pseudo-Boolean constraints, which is agnostic to the planning algorithm used. As a case study, we show how to modify the $A^{*}$ algorithm to produce proofs of optimality with modest overhead, using pattern database heuristics and $h^\textit{max}$ as concrete examples. The same proof logging approach works for any heuristic whose inferences can be efficiently expressed as reasoning over pseudo-Boolean constraints.

In response to the lack of trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for sequential planning, we design a Computational Tree Logic-guided large language model (LLM)-based natural language explanation framework designed for the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm. MCTS is often considered challenging to interpret due to the complexity of its search trees, but our framework is flexible enough to handle a wide range of free-form post-hoc queries and knowledge-based inquiries centered around MCTS and the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of the application domain. By transforming user queries into logic and variable statements, our framework ensures that the evidence obtained from the search tree remains factually consistent with the underlying environmental dynamics and any constraints in the actual stochastic control process. We evaluate the framework rigorously through quantitative assessments, where it demonstrates strong performance in terms of accuracy and factual consistency.

To address the challenges of high resource dynamism and intensive task concurrency in microservice systems, this paper proposes an adaptive resource scheduling method based on the A3C reinforcement learning algorithm. The scheduling problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, where policy and value networks are jointly optimized to enable fine-grained resource allocation under varying load conditions. The method incorporates an asynchronous multi-threaded learning mechanism, allowing multiple agents to perform parallel sampling and synchronize updates to the global network parameters. This design improves both policy convergence efficiency and model stability. In the experimental section, a real-world dataset is used to construct a scheduling scenario. The proposed method is compared with several typical approaches across multiple evaluation metrics, including task delay, scheduling success rate, resource utilization, and convergence speed. The results show that the proposed method delivers high scheduling performance and system stability in multi-task concurrent environments. It effectively alleviates the resource allocation bottlenecks faced by traditional methods under heavy load, demonstrating its practical value for intelligent scheduling in microservice systems.

This article proposes a new path planning method for addressing multi-level terrain situations. The proposed method includes innovations in three aspects: 1) the pre-processing of point cloud maps with a multi-level skip-list structure and data-slimming algorithm for well-organized and simplified map formalization and management, 2) the direct acquisition of local traversability indexes through vehicle and point cloud interaction analysis, which saves work in surface fitting, and 3) the assignment of traversability indexes on a multi-level connectivity graph to generate a weighted traversability graph for generally search-based path planning. The A* algorithm is modified to utilize the traversability graph to generate a short and safe path. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method are verified through indoor and outdoor experiments conducted in various environments, including multi-floor buildings, woodland, and rugged mountainous regions. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can properly address 3D path planning problems for ground vehicles in a wide range of situations.

As LLM-generated code grows in popularity, more evaluation is needed to assess the risks of using such tools, especially for safety-critical applications such as path planning. Existing coding benchmarks are insufficient as they do not reflect the context and complexity of safety-critical applications. To this end, we assessed six LLMs' abilities to generate the code for three different path-planning algorithms and tested them on three maps of various difficulties. Our results suggest that LLM-generated code presents serious hazards for path planning applications and should not be applied in safety-critical contexts without rigorous testing.