For planning an assembly of a product from a given set of parts, robots necessitate certain cognitive skills: high-level planning is needed to decide the order of actuation actions, while geometric reasoning is needed to check the feasibility of these actions. For collaborative assembly tasks with humans, robots require further cognitive capabilities, such as commonsense reasoning, sensing, and communication skills, not only to cope with the uncertainty caused by incomplete knowledge about the humans' behaviors but also to ensure safer collaborations. We propose a novel method for collaborative assembly planning under uncertainty, that utilizes hybrid conditional planning extended with commonsense reasoning and a rich set of communication actions for collaborative tasks. Our method is based on answer set programming. We show the applicability of our approach in a real-world assembly domain, where a bi-manual Baxter robot collaborates with a human teammate to assemble furniture. This manuscript is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

The instrumentation of real systems is often designed for control purposes and control inputs are designed to achieve nominal control objectives. Hence, the available measurements may not be sufficient to isolate faults with certainty and diagnoses are ambiguous. Active diagnosis formulates a planning problem to generate a sequence of actions that, applied to the system, enforce diagnosability and allow to iteratively refine ambiguous diagnoses. This paper analyses the requirements for applying active diagnosis to space systems and proposes ActHyDiag as an effective framework to solve this problem. It presents the results of applying ActHyDiag to a real space case study and of implementing the generated plans in the form of On-Board Control Procedures. The case study is a redundant Spacewire Network where up to 6 instruments, monitored and controlled by the on-board software hosted in the Satellite Management Unit, are transferring science data to a mass memory unit through Spacewire routers. Experiments have been conducted on a real physical benchmark developed by Thales Alenia Space and demonstrate the effectiveness of the plans proposed by ActHyDiag.

The deployment of robots in public environments is gaining more and more attention and interest both for the research opportunities and for the possibility of developing commercial applications over it. In these scenarios, proper definitions and implementations of human-robot interactions are crucial and the specific characteristics of the environment (in particular, the presence of untrained users) makes the task of defining and implementing effective interactions particularly challenging. In this paper, we describe a method and a fully implemented robotic system using conditional planning for generating and executing short-term interactions by a robot deployed in a public environment. To this end, the proposed method integrates and extends two components already successfully used for planning in robotics: ROSPlan and Petri Net Plans. The contributions of this paper are the problem definition of generating short-term interactions as a conditional planning problem and the description of a solution fully implemented on a real robot. The proposed method is based on the integration between a contingent planner in ROSPlan and the Petri Net Plans execution framework, and it has been tested in different scenarios where the robot interacted with hundreds of untrained users.

Collaboration between humans and robots to accomplish different kinds of tasks has been recently studied as a planning problem and several techniques have been developed to define and generate shared plans where humans and robots collaborate to achieve a common goal. However, current methods require the knowledge of the human about the plan under execution and an agreement between users and robots about their roles before the execution of the plan. In this paper, we propose an extension to the Hierarchical Agent-based Task Planner (HA TP) that enables humans and robots to negotiate some aspects of the collaboration online during the execution of the plan. The proposed method is based on the automatic generation of a conditional plan in which missing information is acquired at execution time by means of sensing actions. The proposed method has been fully implemented and tested on a real robot performing collaborative tasks in an office-like environment.

Planning with sensing actions under partial observability is a computationally challenging problem that is fundamental to the realization of AI tasks in areas as diverse as robotics, game playing, and diagnostic problem solving. Recent work on generating plans for partially observable domains has advocated for online planning, claiming that offline plans are often too large to generate. Here we push the envelope on this challenging problem, proposing a technique for generating conditional (aka contingent) plans offline. The key to our planner's success is the reliance on state-of-the-art techniques for fully observable non-deterministic (FOND) planning. In particular, we use an existing compilation for converting a planning problem under partial observability and sensing to a FOND planning problem. With a modified FOND planner in hand, we are able to scale beyond previous techniques for generating conditional plans with solutions that are orders of magnitude smaller than previously possible in some domains.

Many real-world decision making tasks require us to choose among several expensive observations. In a sensor network, for example, it is important to select the subset of sensors that is expected to provide the strongest reduction in uncertainty. In medical decision making tasks, one needs to select which tests to administer before deciding on the most effective treatment. It has been general practice to use heuristic-guided procedures for selecting observations. In this paper, we present the first efficient optimal algorithms for selecting observations for a class of probabilistic graphical models. For example, our algorithms allow to optimally label hidden variables in Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We provide results for both selecting the optimal subset of observations, and for obtaining an optimal conditional observation plan. Furthermore we prove a surprising result: In most graphical models tasks, if one designs an efficient algorithm for chain graphs, such as HMMs, this procedure can be generalized to polytree graphical models. We prove that the optimizing value of information is $NP^{PP}$-hard even for polytrees. It also follows from our results that just computing decision theoretic value of information objective functions, which are commonly used in practice, is a #P-complete problem even on Naive Bayes models (a simple special case of polytrees). In addition, we consider several extensions, such as using our algorithms for scheduling observation selection for multiple sensors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several real-world datasets, including a prototype sensor network deployment for energy conservation in buildings.

We consider the problem of approximate belief-state monitoring using particle filtering for the purposes of implementing a policy for a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP). While particle filtering has become a widely-used tool in AI for monitoring dynamical systems, rather scant attention has been paid to their use in the context of decision making. Assuming the existence of a value function, we derive error bounds on decision quality associated with filtering using importance sampling. We also describe an adaptive procedure that can be used to dynamically determine the number of samples required to meet specific error bounds. Empirical evidence is offered supporting this technique as a profitable means of directing sampling effort where it is needed to distinguish policies.

In this paper a proof system is developed for plan verification problems $\{X\}c\{Y\}$ and $\{X\}c\{KW p\}$ under 0-approximation semantics for ${\mathcal A}_K$. Here, for a plan $c$, two sets $X,Y$ of fluent literals, and a literal $p$, $\{X\}c\{Y\}$ (resp. $\{X\}c\{KW p\}$) means that all literals of $Y$ become true (resp. $p$ becomes known) after executing $c$ in any initial state in which all literals in $X$ are true.Then, soundness and completeness are proved. The proof system allows verifying plans and generating plans as well.

We extend the 0-approximation of sensing actions and incomplete information in [Son and Baral 2000] to action theories with static causal laws and prove its soundness with respect to the possible world semantics. We also show that the conditional planning problem with respect to this approximation is NP-complete. We then present an answer set programming based conditional planner, called ASCP, that is capable of generating both conformant plans and conditional plans in the presence of sensing actions, incomplete information about the initial state, and static causal laws. We prove the correctness of our implementation and argue that our planner is sound and complete with respect to the proposed approximation. Finally, we present experimental results comparing ASCP to other planners.

Many real-world decision making tasks require us to choose among several expensive observations. In a sensor network, for example, it is important to select the subset of sensors that is expected to provide the strongest reduction in uncertainty. In medical decision making tasks, one needs to select which tests to administer before deciding on the most effective treatment. It has been general practice to use heuristic-guided procedures for selecting observations. In this paper, we present the first efficient optimal algorithms for selecting observations for a class of probabilistic graphical models. For example, our algorithms allow to optimally label hidden variables in Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We provide results for both selecting the optimal subset of observations, and for obtaining an optimal conditional observation plan. Furthermore we prove a surprising result: In most graphical models tasks, if one designs an efficient algorithm for chain graphs, such as HMMs, this procedure can be generalized to polytree graphical models. We prove that the optimizing value of information is $NP^{PP}$-hard even for polytrees. It also follows from our results that just computing decision theoretic value of information objective functions, which are commonly used in practice, is a #P-complete problem even on Naive Bayes models (a simple special case of polytrees). In addition, we consider several extensions, such as using our algorithms for scheduling observation selection for multiple sensors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several real-world datasets, including a prototype sensor network deployment for energy conservation in buildings.