ReCon: An Online Task ReConfiguration Approach for Robust Plan Execution

Abstract

The paper presents an approach for the robust plan execution in presence of consumable and continuous resources. Plan execution is a critical activity since a number of unexpected situations could prevent the feasibility of tasks to be accomplished; however, many robotic scenarios (e.g. in space exploration) disallow robotic systems to perform significant deviations from the original plan formulation. In order to both (i) preserve the "stability" of the current plan and (ii) provide the system with a reasonable level of autonomy in handling unexpected situations, an innovative approach based on task reconfiguration is presented. Exploiting an enriched action formulation grounding on the notion of execution modalities, ReCon replaces the replanning mechanism with a novel reconfiguration mechanism, handled by means of a CSP solver. The paper studies the system for a typical planetary rover mission and provides a rich experimental analysis showing that, when the anomalies refer to unexpected resources consumption, the reconfiguration is not only more efficient but also more effective than a plan adaptation mechanism. The experiments are performed by evaluating the recovery performances depending on constraints on computational costs.

Strategy Repair in Reachability Games

“…Strategy Repair is very related to the notion of plan repair, originally introduced (as plan reuse) in Classical Planning, by [13]. While in that work it is shown that repairing is not more efficient, in general, than replanning, the former exhibits higher effectiveness in practice [10,17]. Surprisingly, while the problem is actively studied in this context , we could not find analogous contributions in the context of Fully Observable Nondeterministic (FOND) Planning, where plans are replaced by policies.…”