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.