1,508 research outputs found
The Metric-FF Planning System: Translating "Ignoring Delete Lists" to Numeric State Variables
Planning with numeric state variables has been a challenge for many years,
and was a part of the 3rd International Planning Competition (IPC-3). Currently
one of the most popular and successful algorithmic techniques in STRIPS
planning is to guide search by a heuristic function, where the heuristic is
based on relaxing the planning task by ignoring the delete lists of the
available actions. We present a natural extension of ``ignoring delete lists''
to numeric state variables, preserving the relevant theoretical properties of
the STRIPS relaxation under the condition that the numeric task at hand is
``monotonic''. We then identify a subset of the numeric IPC-3 competition
language, ``linear tasks'', where monotonicity can be achieved by
pre-processing. Based on that, we extend the algorithms used in the heuristic
planning system FF to linear tasks. The resulting system Metric-FF is,
according to the IPC-3 results which we discuss, one of the two currently most
efficient numeric planners
The FF Planning System: Fast Plan Generation Through Heuristic Search
We describe and evaluate the algorithmic techniques that are used in the FF
planning system. Like the HSP system, FF relies on forward state space search,
using a heuristic that estimates goal distances by ignoring delete lists.
Unlike HSP's heuristic, our method does not assume facts to be independent. We
introduce a novel search strategy that combines hill-climbing with systematic
search, and we show how other powerful heuristic information can be extracted
and used to prune the search space. FF was the most successful automatic
planner at the recent AIPS-2000 planning competition. We review the results of
the competition, give data for other benchmark domains, and investigate the
reasons for the runtime performance of FF compared to HSP
Marvin: A Heuristic Search Planner with Online Macro-Action Learning
This paper describes Marvin, a planner that competed in the Fourth
International Planning Competition (IPC 4). Marvin uses
action-sequence-memoisation techniques to generate macro-actions, which are
then used during search for a solution plan. We provide an overview of its
architecture and search behaviour, detailing the algorithms used. We also
empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of its features in various planning
domains; in particular, the effects on performance due to the use of
macro-actions, the novel features of its search behaviour, and the native
support of ADL and Derived Predicates
The GRT Planning System: Backward Heuristic Construction in Forward State-Space Planning
This paper presents GRT, a domain-independent heuristic planning system for
STRIPS worlds. GRT solves problems in two phases. In the pre-processing phase,
it estimates the distance between each fact and the goals of the problem, in a
backward direction. Then, in the search phase, these estimates are used in
order to further estimate the distance between each intermediate state and the
goals, guiding so the search process in a forward direction and on a best-first
basis. The paper presents the benefits from the adoption of opposite directions
between the preprocessing and the search phases, discusses some difficulties
that arise in the pre-processing phase and introduces techniques to cope with
them. Moreover, it presents several methods of improving the efficiency of the
heuristic, by enriching the representation and by reducing the size of the
problem. Finally, a method of overcoming local optimal states, based on domain
axioms, is proposed. According to it, difficult problems are decomposed into
easier sub-problems that have to be solved sequentially. The performance
results from various domains, including those of the recent planning
competitions, show that GRT is among the fastest planners
Task planning using physics-based heuristics on manipulation actions
© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In order to solve mobile manipulation problems, the efficient combination of task and motion planning is usually required. Moreover, the incorporation of physics-based information has recently been taken into account in order to plan the tasks in a more realistic way. In the present paper, a task and motion planning framework is proposed based on a modified version of the Fast-Forward task planner that is guided by physics-based knowledge.
The proposal uses manipulation knowledge for reasoning on symbolic literals (both in offline and online modes) taking into account geometric information in order to evaluate the applicability as well as feasibility of actions while evaluating the heuristic cost. It results in an efficient search of the state space and in the obtention of low-cost physically-feasible plans. The proposal has been implemented and is illustrated with a manipulation problem consisting of a mobile robot and some fixed and manipulatable objects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Taming Numbers and Durations in the Model Checking Integrated Planning System
The Model Checking Integrated Planning System (MIPS) is a temporal least
commitment heuristic search planner based on a flexible object-oriented
workbench architecture. Its design clearly separates explicit and symbolic
directed exploration algorithms from the set of on-line and off-line computed
estimates and associated data structures. MIPS has shown distinguished
performance in the last two international planning competitions. In the last
event the description language was extended from pure propositional planning to
include numerical state variables, action durations, and plan quality objective
functions. Plans were no longer sequences of actions but time-stamped
schedules. As a participant of the fully automated track of the competition,
MIPS has proven to be a general system; in each track and every benchmark
domain it efficiently computed plans of remarkable quality. This article
introduces and analyzes the most important algorithmic novelties that were
necessary to tackle the new layers of expressiveness in the benchmark problems
and to achieve a high level of performance. The extensions include critical
path analysis of sequentially generated plans to generate corresponding optimal
parallel plans. The linear time algorithm to compute the parallel plan bypasses
known NP hardness results for partial ordering by scheduling plans with respect
to the set of actions and the imposed precedence relations. The efficiency of
this algorithm also allows us to improve the exploration guidance: for each
encountered planning state the corresponding approximate sequential plan is
scheduled. One major strength of MIPS is its static analysis phase that grounds
and simplifies parameterized predicates, functions and operators, that infers
knowledge to minimize the state description length, and that detects domain
object symmetries. The latter aspect is analyzed in detail. MIPS has been
developed to serve as a complete and optimal state space planner, with
admissible estimates, exploration engines and branching cuts. In the
competition version, however, certain performance compromises had to be made,
including floating point arithmetic, weighted heuristic search exploration
according to an inadmissible estimate and parameterized optimization
Marvin : macro-actions from reduced versions of the instance
Marvin is a forward-chaining heuristic-search planner. The basic search strategy used is similar to FF's enforced hill-climbing with helpful actions (Hoffmann and Nebel 2001); Marvin extends this strategy, adding extra features to the search and preprocessing steps to infer information from the domain
A case-based approach to heuristic planning
Most of the great success of heuristic search as an approach to AI Planning is due to the right design of domain-independent heuristics. Although many heuristic planners perform reasonably well, the computational cost of computing the heuristic function in every search node is very high, causing the planner to scale poorly when increasing the size of the planning tasks. For tackling this problem, planners can incorporate additional domain-dependent heuristics in order to improve their performance. Learning-based planners try to automatically acquire these domain-dependent heuristics using previous solved problems. In this work, we present a case-based reasoning approach that learns abstracted state transitions that serve as domain control knowledge for improving the planning process. The recommendations from the retrieved cases are used as guidance for pruning or ordering nodes in different heuristic search algorithms applied to planning tasks. We show that the CBR guidance is appropriate for a considerable number of planning benchmarks.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish MEC projects PELEA: TIN2008-6701-C03-03 and PlanInteraction: TIN2011-27652-C03-02.Publicad
FFRob: An Efficient Heuristic for Task and Motion Planning
Manipulation problemsinvolvingmany objects present substantial challenges for motion planning algorithms due to the high dimensionality and multi-modality of the search space. Symbolic task planners can efficiently construct plans involving many entities but cannot incorporate the constraints from geometry and kinematics. In this paper, we show how to extend the heuristic ideas from one of the most successful symbolic planners in recent years, the FastForward (FF) planner, to motion planning, and to compute it efficiently. We use a multi-query roadmap structure that can be conditionalized to model different placements of movable objects. The resulting tightly integrated planner is simple and performs efficiently in a collection of tasks involving manipulation of many objects.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant No. 019868)United States. Office of Naval Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (grant N00014-09-1-1051)United States. Air Force. Office of Scientific Research (grant AOARD-104135)Singapore. Ministry of Educatio
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