52,506 research outputs found
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
A Novel SAT-Based Approach to the Task Graph Cost-Optimal Scheduling Problem
The Task Graph Cost-Optimal Scheduling Problem consists in scheduling a certain number of interdependent tasks onto a set of heterogeneous processors (characterized by idle and running rates per time unit), minimizing the cost of the entire process. This paper provides a novel formulation for this scheduling puzzle, in which an optimal solution is computed through a sequence of Binate Covering Problems, hinged within a Bounded Model Checking paradigm. In this approach, each covering instance, providing a min-cost trace for a given schedule depth, can be solved with several strategies, resorting to Minimum-Cost Satisfiability solvers or Pseudo-Boolean Optimization tools. Unfortunately, all direct resolution methods show very low efficiency and scalability. As a consequence, we introduce a specialized method to solve the same sequence of problems, based on a traditional all-solution SAT solver. This approach follows the "circuit cofactoring" strategy, as it exploits a powerful technique to capture a large set of solutions for any new SAT counter-example. The overall method is completed with a branch-and-bound heuristic which evaluates lower and upper bounds of the schedule length, to reduce the state space that has to be visited. Our results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the blind binate covering schema, and it outperforms general purpose state-of-the-art tool
Conditional Task and Motion Planning through an Effort-based Approach
This paper proposes a preliminary work on a Conditional Task and Motion
Planning algorithm able to find a plan that minimizes robot efforts while
solving assigned tasks. Unlike most of the existing approaches that replan a
path only when it becomes unfeasible (e.g., no collision-free paths exist), the
proposed algorithm takes into consideration a replanning procedure whenever an
effort-saving is possible. The effort is here considered as the execution time,
but it is extensible to the robot energy consumption. The computed plan is both
conditional and dynamically adaptable to the unexpected environmental changes.
Based on the theoretical analysis of the algorithm, authors expect their
proposal to be complete and scalable. In progress experiments aim to prove this
investigation
Online Planner Selection with Graph Neural Networks and Adaptive Scheduling
Automated planning is one of the foundational areas of AI. Since no single
planner can work well for all tasks and domains, portfolio-based techniques
have become increasingly popular in recent years. In particular, deep learning
emerges as a promising methodology for online planner selection. Owing to the
recent development of structural graph representations of planning tasks, we
propose a graph neural network (GNN) approach to selecting candidate planners.
GNNs are advantageous over a straightforward alternative, the convolutional
neural networks, in that they are invariant to node permutations and that they
incorporate node labels for better inference.
Additionally, for cost-optimal planning, we propose a two-stage adaptive
scheduling method to further improve the likelihood that a given task is solved
in time. The scheduler may switch at halftime to a different planner,
conditioned on the observed performance of the first one. Experimental results
validate the effectiveness of the proposed method against strong baselines,
both deep learning and non-deep learning based.
The code is available at \url{https://github.com/matenure/GNN_planner}.Comment: AAAI 2020. Code is released at
https://github.com/matenure/GNN_planner. Data set is released at
https://github.com/IBM/IPC-graph-dat
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
Model checking embedded system designs
We survey the basic principles behind the application of model checking to controller verification and synthesis. A promising development is the area of guided model checking, in which the state space search strategy of the model checking algorithm can be influenced to visit more interesting sets of states first. In particular, we discuss how model checking can be combined with heuristic cost functions to guide search strategies. Finally, we list a number of current research developments, especially in the area of reachability analysis for optimal control and related issues
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