Combining Task and Motion Planning for Real-World Applications (TAMPRA)

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List of Accepted Papers and Workshop Schedule

A longstanding aim of research in AI has been to employ discrete task planning capabilities in the service of mobile robots. Since the early days of Shakey, the planning community has worked to build algorithms that would allow a robot to reason about its own actions before (or while) carrying them out physically. Recent advances in artificial vision, manipulation, motion planning and control have done a great deal to bring this vision closer to fruition.

Despite these promising developments, existing commercial systems rarely exhibit fully autonomous task and motion planning capabilities. This is not due to a lack of interest, but rather to our lack of understanding how discrete task planning can be integrated with advanced motion planning techniques. Research has not yet produced the algorithmic and theoretical results necessary to integrate techniques for automated decision making at the task and motion planning levels. The major challenges are twofold: real-world applications pose complex requirements, such as dynamic environments and real-time, continuous operation; and there is an inherent difficulty in combining the radically different search and inference procedures underlying the two forms of planning.

Focus

In the last few years, autonomous mobile robots have become a commercial reality. Despite the increasing availability of autonomous solutions, by and large, these systems rely on pre-calculated motions and static, pre-computed plans. Companies have a real interest in increasing the level of automation provided by their solutions, both at the task planning and at the motion planning levels. This workshop aims to bring an application focus to the problem of integrating these two forms of planning, and to ground the scientific problems underlying such integration.

Topics of interest

TAMPRA is open to solutions for any combination of task and motion planning techniques. Preference will be accorded to papers that include experimental work in real-world applications. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Experimental results from fielded systems
• Reasoning with kinodynamic constraints
• Constraint-based reasoning
• Planning under uncertainty
• Geometric, temporal, and/or spatial reasoning
• Resource reasoning / scheduling
• Manipulation planning techniques
• Meta-CSP techniques for integrated reasoning
• HTN, classical and timeline-based planning
• Decision-theoretic planning

Accepted Papers

The following papers have been accepted for oral presentation:

• Ming C. Lin, Jia Pan, Chonhyon Park, Dinesh Manocha
  Simulating Human-like Motion in Constrained Dynamic Environments
• Fabien Lagriffoul, Lars Karlsson, Alessandro Saffiotti
  Constraints on Intervals for Reducing the Search Space of Geometric Configurations
• Lars Karlsson, Julien Bidot, Fabien Lagriffoul, Alessandro Saffiotti, Ulrich Hillenbrand, Florian Schmidt
  Combining Task and Path Planning for a Humanoid Two-arm Robotic System
• Erion Plaku
  Planning Robot Motions to Satisfy Linear Temporal Logic, Geometric, and Differential Constraints
• Nichola Abdo, Henrik Kretzschmar, Cyrill Stachniss
  From Low-Level Trajectory Demonstrations to Symbolic Actions for Planning
• João Paulo da Silva Fonseca, Rodrigo Nogueira Cardoso, William Henrique Pereira Guimarães, Kauê de Sousa Ribeiro, Alexandre Rodrigues de Sousa, José Jean Paul Zanlucchi de Souza Tavares
  Automated Planning and Real Systems Based on PLC: A Practical Application in a Didactic Bench of Manufacturing Automation
• Federico Pecora, Marcello Cirillo
  A Constraint-Based Approach for Multiple Non-Holonomic Vehicle Coordination in Industrial Scenarios

Workshop Schedule

TAMPRA 2012 is a full day workshop and it will be held on June 26^th 2012.

Full papers will be allocated 30 minutes of time. This includes a 20 minute presentation by one of the authors and 10 minutes for questions and discussions.  Short papers will be allocated 20 minutes, of which 5 for discussion. As part of the workshop, a final discussion session will be opened by invited speaker Sven Koenig.

Please note that the following schedule is not yet final and could be subject to modifications.

9.30
Welcome message and introduction

9.40 - 11.00
Session 1: Combining motion and task planning for high DOF robots

• Ming C. Lin, Jia Pan, Chonhyon Park, Dinesh Manocha
  Simulating Human-like Motion in Constrained Dynamic Environments
• Lars Karlsson, Julien Bidot, Fabien Lagriffoul, Alessandro Saffiotti, Ulrich Hillenbrand, Florian Schmidt
  Combining Task and Path Planning for a Humanoid Two-arm Robotic System
• Fabien Lagriffoul, Lars Karlsson, Alessandro Saffiotti
  Constraints on Intervals for Reducing the Search Space of Geometric Configurations

11.00 - 11.30
Coffee break

11.30 -  12.30
Session 2: Symbolic knowledge in task and motion planning

• Erion Plaku
  Planning Robot Motions to Satisfy Linear Temporal Logic, Geometric, and Differential Constraints
• Nichola Abdo, Henrik Kretzschmar, Cyrill Stachniss
  From Low-Level Trajectory Demonstrations to Symbolic Actions for Planning

12.30 - 14.00
Lunch

14.00 - 15.00
Session 3: Application scenarios

• João Paulo da Silva Fonseca, Rodrigo Nogueira Cardoso, William Henrique Pereira Guimarães, Kauê de Sousa Ribeiro, Alexandre Rodrigues de Sousa, José Jean Paul Zanlucchi de Souza Tavares
  Automated Planning and Real Systems Based on PLC: A Practical Application in a Didactic Bench of Manufacturing Automation
• Federico Pecora, Marcello Cirillo
  A Constraint-Based Approach for Multiple Non-Holonomic Vehicle Coordination in Industrial Scenarios

15.00 - 15.30
Coffee break

15.30 - 16.30
Discussion session (opened by invited speaker Sven Koenig)

16.30
Final remarks and conclusions.

Important dates

• Paper submission deadline: April 1^st 2012  
• Notification of acceptance: April 23^rd 2012
• Camera-ready version due: May 13^th 2012
• Workshop: June 26^th 2012

Organizers

• Marcello Cirillo -- AASS, Örebro University
• Brian Gerkey -- Willow Garage
• Federico Pecora -- AASS, Örebro University
• Mike Stilman -- Georgia Institute of Technology

Program committee

• Bhaskara Marthi -- Willow Garage
• Emrah Akın Şişbot -- University of Washington
• Tsz-Chiu Au -- The University of Texas at Austin
• Adi Botea -- NICTA
• Wolfram Burgard -- University of Freiburg
• Marc Cavazza -- University of Teesside 
• Sachin Chitta -- Willow Garage
• Minh Do -- NASA Ames/SGT Inc.
• Esra Erdem -- Sabanci University
• Jean-Loup Farges -- ONERA
• Susana Fernández Arregui -- U. Carlos III de Madrid
• Alberto Finzi -- Università di Napoli "Federico II"
• Julien Guitton -- LAAS-CNRS
• Geoffrey Hollinger -- University of Southern California
• Kaijen Hsiao -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Lars Karlsson -- Örebro University
• Sven Koenig -- University of Southern California
• Carlos Linares López -- Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Héctor Muñoz Ávila -- Lehigh University
• Jeff Orkin -- MIT Media Lab
• Volkan Patoğlu -- Sabanci University
• David Pizzi -- University of Teesside
• Erion Plaku -- Catholic University of America
• Roland Phillipsen -- Halmstad University
• Mihail Pivtoraiko -- Carnegie Mellon University
• Ananth Ranganathan -- Honda Research Institute
• Alessandro Saffiotti -- Örebro University
• Sanem Sariel Talay -- Istanbul Technical University
• David Sislak -- Czech Technical University in Prague
• David E. Smith -- NASA
• Kartik Talamadupula -- Arizona State University