Machine Learning, 6(1): 111-143.

Artificial Intelligence vol. 52, pp 49-86, 1991.

Artificial Intelligence 51, pp. 95-143

In Langton, C., Taylor, C., Farmer, J. D., and Ramussen, S. (Eds.), Artificial Life II, pp. 487–509. Addison-Wesley

The paper Systematic Nonlinear Planning (published in the Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91) won the AAAI-10 classic paper award. The commentary by Daniel S. Weld describes the two major impacts the paper had on the field of automated planning.See also:Commentary by Dan WeldAn Introduction to Least Commitment Planning, Daniel S. Weld, AI Magazine, Vol 15, No 4 Proc. AAAI-91, Vol. 2, pp. 634–639

At the control level, distinctive places and distinctive travel edges are identified based on the interaction between the robot's control strategies, its sensorimotor system, and the world. A distinctive place is defined as the local maximum of a distinctiveness measure appropriate to its immediate neighborhood, and is found by a hill-climbing control strategy. A distinctive travel edge, similarly, is defined by a suitable measure and a path-following control strategy. The topological network description is created by linking the distinctive places and travel edges. Metrical information is then incrementally assimilated into local geometric descriptions of places and edges, and finally merged into a global geometric map.

IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 7 (3), 278-88

Master’s report, Computer Science Division, University of California.

Abstraction, in contrast to meta-level inference, works with a degenerate version of the object-level space in which some essential detail is thrown away. Because abstract plans are strongly tied to the object-level space, they are limited in their expressive power.