Automating Transfer of Robot Task Plans using Functorial Data Migrations
This addresses the problem of robot plan interoperability for robotics researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ontology-based methods with a new theoretical framework.
The paper tackles the problem of transferring robot task plans between different domains by using functorial data migrations from category theory, enabling plan transfer without replanning, and demonstrates this by transferring a plan from Blocksworld to AI2-THOR Kitchen.
This paper introduces a novel approach to ontology-based robot plan transfer by leveraging functorial data migrations, a structured mapping method derived from category theory. Functors provide structured maps between planning domain ontologies which enables the transfer of task plans without the need for replanning. Unlike methods tailored to specific plans, our framework applies universally within the source domain once a structured map is defined. We demonstrate this approach by transferring a task plan from the canonical Blocksworld domain to one compatible with the AI2-THOR Kitchen environment. Additionally, we discuss practical limitations, propose benchmarks for evaluating symbolic plan transfer methods, and outline future directions for scaling this approach.