Control of autonomous mobile robots with automated planning

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach for the control of autonomous robots, based on Automated Planning (AP) techniques, where a control architecture was developed (ROPEM: RObot Plan Execution with Monitoring). The proposed architecture is composed of a set of modules that integrates deliberation with a standard planner, execution, monitoring and replanning. We avoid robotic-device and platform dependency by using a low level control layer, implemented in the Player framework, separated from the high level task execution that depends on the domain we are working on; that way we also ensure reusability of the high and low level layers. As robot task execution is non-deterministic, we can not predict the result of performing a given action and for that reason we also use a module that supervises the execution and detects when we have reached the goals or an unexpected state. Separated from the execution, we included a planning module in charge of determining the actions that will let the robot achieve its high level goals. In order to test the performance of our contribution we conducted a set of experiments on the International Planning Competition (IPC) domain Rovers, with a real robot (Pioneer P3DX). We tested the planning/replanning capabilities of the ROPEM architecture with different controlled sources of uncertainty.