ylfink@water.waterloo.edu (ylfink) (03/28/88)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
RECRUITING/ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
- Thursday, March 31, 1988
Dr. R. James Firby, of Yale University, will speak on
``Adaptive Planning in Complex Uncertain Worlds''.
TIME: 11:30 AM
ROOM: MC 3005
ABSTRACT
A robot acting in the real world must be controlled
with a flexible plan. A plan is usually conceived as a
list of primitive robot actions to be executed one
after another. However, in a complex domain a plan must
have much more structure to enable it to cope
effectively with the myriad of unpredictable details it
will encounter during execution and to respond
appropriately to effector slips and sudden situation
changes. Adding structure to a plan involves more than
augmenting the primitive plan representation, it also
requires a new model of plan execution. Execution of
one predetermined action after another does not suffice
when actions must be retried or attention shifted to
address unexpected events.
We propose a plan representation based on program-like
reactive adaptation packages, or RAPs. A plan is
constructed using RAPs and, at execution time, each RAP
decides which primitive robot actions are appropriate
for its task given the situation encountered. Within
such a system, execution monitoring becomes an
intrinsic part of the execution algorithm, and the need
for separate replanning on failure disappears.
RAPs are more than just programs to run at execution
time, however, they are also hierarchical building
blocks that direct plan construction. Hence, the RAP
representation is declarative enough that a RAP's
expected behavior is evident to the planning machinery.
This talk presents the RAP planning concept, sketching
out a RAP executor, a simple RAP based planner and a
RAP representation that supports both execution and
planning.