More knowledge on the table: Planning with space, time and resources for robots

Abstract

AI-based solutions for robot planning have so far focused on very high-level abstractions of robot capabilities and of the environment in which they operate. However, to be useful in a robotic context, the model provided to an AI planner should afford both symbolic and metric constructs; its expressiveness should not hinder computational efficiency; and it should include causal, spatial, temporal and resource aspects of the domain. We propose a planner grounded on well-founded constraint-based calculi that adhere to these requirements. A proof of completeness is provided, and the flexibility and portability of the approach is validated through several experiments on real and simulated robot platforms.