A planning architecture for mobile robotics

Abstract

Mobile robots such as explorer rovers need task and path planning abilities in order to fulfill their assigned missions: path planning to plan their movements and task planning to plan their actions. The coupling between these two kinds of planning presents open issues such as the description of the environment and the consideration of geometric constraints that must be verified in order to act and move during an action. This paper addresses these issues by proposing an architecture in which a hierarchical task planner sends requests to a path planner in order to check the feasibility of actions. Requirements allowing the path planner to produce an answer are presented as well as the description of planning operators. Finally, we specify the mechanism and the communication language by which the task planner produces requests and takes into account answers.