Towards Integrating Hierarchical Goal Networks and Motion Planners to Support Planning for Human Robot Collaboration in Assembly Cells

Low-level motion planning techniques must be combined with high-level task planning formalisms in order to generate realistic plans that can be carried out by humans and robots. Previous attempts to integrate these two planning formalisms mostly used either Classical Planning or HTN Planning. Recently, we developed Hierarchical Goal Networks (HGNs), a new hierarchical planning formalism that combines the advantages of HTN and Classical planning, while mitigating some of the disadvantages of each individual formalism. In this paper, we describe our ongoing research on designing a planning formalism and algorithm that exploits the unique features of HGNs to better integrate task and motion planning. We also describe how the proposed planning framework can be instantiated to solve assembly planning problems involving human-robot teams.