Hybrid Task Planning Grounded in Belief: Constructing Physical Copies of Simple Structures

Abstract

Symbolic planning methods have proved to be challenging in robotics due to partial observability and noise as well as unavoidable exceptions to rules that symbol semantics depend on. Often the symbols that a robot considers to support for planning are brittle, making them unsuited for even relatively short term use. Maturing probabilistic methods in robotics, however, are providing a sound basis for symbol grounding that supports using probabilistic distributions over symbolic entities as the basis for planning. In this paper, we describe a belief-space planner that stabilizes the semantics of feedback from the environment by actively interacting with a scene. When distributions over higher-level abstractions stabilize, powerful symbolic planning techniques can provide reliable guidance for problem solving. We present such an approach in a hybrid planning scheme that actively controls uncertainty and yields robust state estimation with bounds on uncertainty that can make effective use of powerful symbolic planning techniques. We illustrate the idea in a hybrid planner for autonomous construction tasks with a real robot system.