While current autonomous navigation systems allow robots to successfully drive themselves from one point another in specific environments, they typically require extensive manual parameter re-tuning by human robotics experts order function new environments. Furthermore, even for just complex environment, a single set of fine-tuned parameters may not work well different regions that environment....

PLANNER is a language f o r p r o v i n g theorems and m a n i p u l a t i n g models in a r o b o t . The language i s b u i l t ou t o f a number o f p rob lem s o l v i n g p r i m i t i v e s t o g e t h e r w i t h a h i e r a r c h i c a l c o n t r o l s t r u c t u r e . S ta tements can b e a s s e r t e d and perhaps l a t e r w i t h d r a w n a s t h e s t a t e o f t he w o r l d c...

Elastic bands are proposed as the basis for a new framework to close the gap between global path planning and real-time sensor-based robot control. An elastic band is a deformable collision-free path. The initial shape of the elastic is the free path generated by a planner. Subjected to artificial forces, the elastic band deforms in real time to a short and smooth path that maintains clearance ...

This paper presents some enhancements in the temporal reasoning of a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner, named SIADEX, that, up to authors knowledge, no other HTN planner has. These new features include a sound partial order metric structure, deadlines, temporal landmarking or synchronization capabilities built on top of a Simple Temporal Network and an efficient constraint propagation eng...

In this paper we describe work in progress that aims to develop a domain-independent tool set which supports the creation and analysis of domain descriptions and plans containing continuously changing processes, instantaneous events, and actions. The tools described are (i) a life history editor that enables a designer to create a domain description diagrammatically, automatically generating mu...

This paper describes adaptive path planning, a novel approach to path planning for car-like mobile robots. Instead of creating a new plan from scratch, whenever changes in the environment invalidate the current plan, the adaptive path planner attempts to adapt the old plan to the new situation. The paper proposes an efficient representation for path that is easily amendable to adaptation. Assoc...

A large number of path planning problems are solved by the use of graph based search algorithms. There are a variety of techniques available to optimize the search within these graphs as well as thorough studies of the complexity involved in searching through them. However, little effort has been dedicated to constructing the graphs so that the results of searching will be optimized. The common...

The causal graph heuristic introduced by Helmert in (Helmert 2004; 2006b) is one of the most interesting recent developments in the heuristic search approach to domainindependent planning. Unlike the additive heuristic used early in the HSP planner (Bonet & Geffner 2001) and the relaxed planning graph heuristic used in FF (Hoffmann & Nebel 2001), the causal graph heuristic is not based on the d...

In many robotic navigation-related tasks, abstracting the environment where mobile robots carry out some mission can be of a great benefit. In particular, extracting a simple topological graph-like representation from a more complex and detailed metric map is often required for path-planning and navigation. In this work, an approach to perform such extraction in grid maps is presented. The focu...

This paper develops an effective, cooperative, and probabilistically-complete multi-robot motion planner. The approach takes into account geometric and differential constraints imposed by the obstacles and the robot dynamics by using sampling to expand a motion tree in the composite state space of all the robots. Scalability and efficiency is achieved by using solutions to a simplified problem ...