SP-0031: When to re-plan: a practical perspective

When to Plan and When to Act?

Faced with a complicated task, some initial planning can significantly increase the likelihood of success and increase efficiency, but planning for too long before starting to act can reduce efficiency. This paper explores the question of when to begin acting for a resource bounded agent. Limitations of an idealized algorithm suggested in the literature are presented and illustrated in the cont...

Practical considerations when generalizing study results: a potential outcomes perspective

Plan Synthesis: A Logical Perspective

This paper explores some theoretical issues of robot system planning from the perspective of propositional dynamic logic. A generalized notion of "progression" and "regression" of conditions through actions Is developed. This leads to a bidirectional single-level planning algorithm that Is easily extended to hierarchical planning. Multiple pre-/postcondition pairs, complex (e.g., conjunctive, d...

How to Plan When Being Deliberately Misled

Reasoning agents are often faced with the need to robustly deal with erroneous information. When a robot given the task of returning with the red cup from the kitchen table arrives in the kitchen to find no red cup but instead notices a blue cup and a red plate on the table, what should it do? The best course of action is to attempt to salvage the situation by relying on its preferences to retu...

Plan Modiication versus Plan Generation: a Complexity-theoretic Perspective

The ability of a planner to modify a plan is considered as a valuable tool for improving ee-ciency of planning by avoiding the repetition of the same planning eeort. From a computational complexity point of view, however, it is by no means obvious that modifying a plan is computationally as easy as planning from scratch if the modiication has to follow the principle of \conservatism," i.e., to ...