Book Description

Abstract: "In this dissertation, we explore architectures and termination criteria for interleaving planning and execution. Our aim is to present a broad study of interleaving, describing approaches that allow safe, early termination of planning episodes and corresponding control systems that achieve specified goal conditions cheaply by taking advantage of the gains incurred through interleaving. We intend to describe a basic control architecture for controlling multiple planning and execution episodes. Furthermore, we will describe planning termination criteria. The criteria will be based on a variety of techniques, from the analysis of the structure of candidate plans to the creation of abstraction systems that 'direct' early termination of ground-level planning. We will present conditions under which theoretical results of soundness, completeness and optimality hold for these techniques. In addition, we will describe long- term empirical results using simulation and real-world mobile robot tests. Finally, throughout this work we also hope to show that many of the current results in the motion planning, finite state machine learning, and mobile robot navigation communities are special cases of the more general systems and termination criteria presented here."