Planning and execution of tasks for a domestic robot

Abstract

This paper proposes an architecture for an autonomous robot designed to perform tasks in a partially structured domestic environment. Particular attention is given to the roles of symbolic reasoning for planning and plan execution in such a robot. An architecture is proposed in which manipulation, mobility and perception are performed by a hierarchy of asynchronous processes. The hierarchies for manipulation, mobility and perception are controlled by a knowledge based “supervisor” which plans and executes domestic tasks. Planning tasks is presented as a problem of search. A review of heuristic search techniques is presented. In this review, the introduction of knowledge in the form of heuristics and subgoals is shown to greatly reduce the computational complexity of planning. Problems related to plan execution are then discussed and a toxonomy of plan execution systems is proposed. The difficulty of plan execution is illustrated using the task “clear the dishes for the dining room table”. The conclusion discusses the state of the art in each of the areas manipulation, mobility, perception, and symbolic reasoning as it applies to an autonomous domestic robot. The final conclusion asserts that progress requires experimentation with integrated systems.