Reactive Planning Simulation in Dynamic Environments with VirtualRobot

This paper describes the architecture of a reactive planning system for dynamic environments, which is specifically designed to deal with robot planning problems. The architecture permits many agents to work simultaneously on the same environment and it is aimed at working with incomplete information. Agents have partial knowledge about the world and data soon becomes obsolete because of the changes in the environment. Our approach is designed to overcome this difficulty through a highly coupled system composed of an incremental planner and an executor. The whole system is integrated into VirtualRobot, a graphical software application, which provides a flexible and open platform to work on robotics. Through VirtualRobot we can incorporate important features into the system as simulation of sensing actions or a monitoring mechanism. Additionally, the planning algorithm is able to work in timelimited situations and use numeric variables. All these features make our planning system be a nice toolkit to deal with reactive robot planning.