A Formal Framework for Robot Construction Problems: A Hybrid Planning Approach
This addresses the challenge of planning for multi-robot construction tasks with stability constraints, representing an incremental advance in hybrid planning methods for robotics.
The paper tackles robot construction problems where multiple autonomous robots rearrange blocks to build stable structures, proposing a formal hybrid planning framework based on Answer Set Programming that computes manipulation tasks while ensuring stability and supportedness at each step, and demonstrates applicability on a Baxter robot.
We study robot construction problems where multiple autonomous robots rearrange stacks of prefabricated blocks to build stable structures. These problems are challenging due to ramifications of actions, true concurrency, and requirements of supportedness of blocks by other blocks and stability of the structure at all times. We propose a formal hybrid planning framework to solve a wide range of robot construction problems, based on Answer Set Programming. This framework not only decides for a stable final configuration of the structure, but also computes the order of manipulation tasks for multiple autonomous robots to build the structure from an initial configuration, while simultaneously ensuring the stability, supportedness and other desired properties of the partial construction at each step of the plan. We prove the soundness and completeness of our formal method with respect to these properties. We introduce a set of challenging robot construction benchmark instances, including bridge building and stack overhanging scenarios, discuss the usefulness of our framework over these instances, and demonstrate the applicability of our method using a bimanual Baxter robot.