Optimal temporal planning at reactive time scales via dynamic backtracking branch and bound

Autonomous robots are being considered for increasingly capable roles in our society, such as urban search and rescue, automation for assisted living, and lunar habitat construction. To fulfill these roles, teams of autonomous robots will need to cooperate together to accomplish complex mission objectives in uncertain and dynamic environments. In these environments, autonomous robots face a host of new challenges, such as responding robustly to timing uncertainties and perturbations, task and coordination failures, and equipment malfunctions. In order to address these challenges, this thesis advocates a novel planning approach, called temporally-flexible contingent planning. A temporally-flexible contingent plan is a compact encoding of methods for achieving the mission objectives which incorporates robustness through flexible task durations, redundant methods, constraints on when methods are applicable, and preferences between methods. This approach enables robots to adapt to unexpected changes on-the-fly by selecting alternative methods at runtime in order to satisfy as best possible the mission objectives. The drawback to this approach, however, is the computational overhead involved in selecting alternative methods at runtime in response to changes.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Effinger, Robert T

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brian C. Williams.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37948

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37948