A multistage decision process for transportation investment planning is described. Most transportation investment problems inherently involve multiple criteria and uncertainty. To deal with the variations arising from changes in external environments, robust contingency plans should be integrated in the planning process-not after plans are developed-to account for uncertainty. With the proposed...

We consider the problem of planning sensor strategies that enable a sensor to be automatically con gured for robot tasks. In this paper we present robust and e cient algorithms for computing the regions from which a sensor has unobstructed or partially obstructed views of a target in a goal. We apply these algorithms to the Error Detection and Recovery problem of recognizing whether a goal or f...

Consider a scheduling scenario in a furniture factory where two robotic agents work together to apply finish to custom table pieces. Robot A is set up to paint, while Robot B must apply varnish. Both actions take an uncertain amount of time due to physical variation in the size and shape of the table components. Painting takes around six minutes to complete, while applying varnish take around t...

This work presents an approach to plan motion strategies for robotics tasks constrained by uncertainty in position, orientation and control. Our approach operates in a (x, y, θ) configuration space and it combines two local functions: a contact-based attraction function and an exploration function. Compliant motions are used to reduce the position/orientation uncertainty. An explicit geometric ...

This paper proposes a solution by genetic algorithms to the problem of planning a robust and suboptimal trajectory in the velocity space of a mobile robot. Robust trajectories are obtained introducing cumulative noise in the evaluation of the fitness function and introducing modifications in the genetic algorithm to taking into account this new feature. Results are presented that show the perfo...

We present a complete path planning algorithm for a plane robot with three degrees of freedom and a static obstacle. The part boundaries consist of n linear and circular edges. The algorithm constructs and searches a combinatorial representation of the robot free space. Its computational complexity is O((n +c3) log n) with c3 ∈ O(n) the number of configurations with three simultaneous contacts ...

We address robust path planning for a mobile agent in a general environment by finding minimum cost source-destination paths having prescribed widths. The main result is a new approach that optimally solves the robust path planning problem using an efficient network flow formulation. Our algorithm represents a significant departure from conventional shortest-path or graph search based methods; ...

The advances in production planning and control in the last decades have con rmed the centralized nature of the planning function. However, centralization has disadvantages when quick response to local production problems is required. Therefore, renewed interest in decentralized approaches emerges. This paper investigates the possibility to use intelligent products for decentralized handling of...

POMDPs provide a rich framework for planning and control in partially observable domains. Recent new algorithms have greatly improved the scalability of POMDPs, to the point where they can be used in robot applications. In this paper, we describe how approximate POMDP solving can be further improved by the use of a new theoretically-motivated algorithm for selecting salient information states. ...

We describe an efficient method for path planning in environments for which prior maps are plagued with uncertainty. Our approach processes the map to determine key areas whose uncertainty is crucial to the planning task. It then incorporates the uncertainty associated with these areas using the recently developed PAO* algorithm to produce a fast, robust solution to the original planning task. ...