We aim to reduce the burden of programming and deploying autonomous systems to work in concert with people in time-critical domains, such as military field operations and disaster response. Deployment plans for these operations are frequently negotiated on-the-fly by teams of human planners. A human operator then translates the agreed upon plan into machine instructions for the robots. We present an algorithm that reduces this translation burden by inferring the final plan from a processed form of the human team's planning conversation. Our approach combines probabilistic generative modeling with logical plan validation used to compute a highly structured prior over possible plans. This hybrid approach enables us to overcome the challenge of performing inference over the large solution space with only a small amount of noisy data from the team planning session. We validate the algorithm through human subject experimentation and show we are able to infer a human team's final plan with 83 accuracy on average. We also describe a robot demonstration in which two people plan and execute a first-response collaborative task with a PR2 robot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that integrates a logical planning technique within a generative model to perform plan inference.
Abstract Metric temporal planning involves both selecting and organising actions to satisfy the goals and also assigning to each of these actions its start time and, where necessary, its duration. The assignment of start times to actions is a central concern of scheduling. In pddl 2.1, the widely adopted planning domain description language standard, metric temporal planning problems are described using actions with durations. A large number of planners have been developed to handle this language, but the great majority of them are fundamentally limited in the class of temporal problems they can solve. In this paper, we review the source of this limitation and present an approach to metric temporal planning that is not so restricted. Our approach links planning and scheduling algorithms into a planner, Crikey , that can successfully tackle a wide range of temporal problems. We show how Crikey can be simplified to solve a wide and interesting subset of metric temporal problems, while remaining competitive with other temporal planners that are unable to handle required concurrency. We provide empirical data comparing the performance of this planner, CRIKEY SHE , our original version, Crikey , and a range of other modern temporal planners. Our contribution is to describe the first competitive planner capable of solving problems that require concurrent actions.