Towards Adjoint Sensing and Acting Schemes and Interleaving Task Planning for Robust Robot Plan

Abstract

Robots operating in open environments expect to have robust plans to achieve tasks successfully under environment uncertainties. However, both partial observability and dynamics of environment states have significantly decreased the robustness of task achievement, making robot task planning much more challenging. The partially observable states require the robot to obtain observations for optimally acting of the task goal. Also, state dynamics expects the robot to continuously observe surroundings for acting safely. Both challenges practically demand the purposeful and tight interactions between robot state-changing actuating actions and sensor-based observation actions. This paper proposes a novel model of Adjoint Sensing and Acting (ASA) that explicitly defines two parallel and sequential interaction schemes between actuating and observation actions, as well as an extended Behavior Tree for a concrete implementation of above schemes. We further propose an interleaving task planning approach for planning ASA-style plans, which integrates a deliberative POMDP planner for pursuing task goals, and a reactive Behavior Tree executive for fast responding to unexpected events. We experimentally demonstrate that ASA interaction schemes are practical and applicable to model and plan the open environment robot tasks. The plans from the interleaving task planning approach are both reactive in run-time response and efficient in task achievement.