PlanRob

2022 Workshop on Planning and Robotics

An ICAPS'22 Workshop
Singapore
16 June 2022

Topics and Objectives

AI Planning & Scheduling (P&S) methods are key to enabling intelligent robots to perform autonomous, flexible, and interactive behaviours. Researchers in the P&S community have continued to develop approaches and produce planners, representations, as well as heuristics that robotics researchers can make use of. However, there remain numerous challenges complicating the uptake, use and successful integration of P&S technology in robotics, many of which have been addressed by robotics researchers with novel solutions. Strong collaboration and synergy between researchers in both communities is vital to the continued growth of the fields in a way that provide mutual benefits to the two communities. To foster this, the PlanRob workshop aims to provide a stable, long-term forum ( having been held annually at ICAPS since 2013) where researchers from both the P&S and Robotics communities can openly discuss relevant issues, research and development progress, future directions and open challenges related to P&S when applied to Robotics. In addition to the usual paper submissions, the workshop’s format naturally lends itself to preliminary results, position papers as well as to work focused on challenges in using and integrating planners in robotics systems.

To celebrate the tenth edition of this workshop at ICAPS, a special session will be organised to relive past PlanRob editions, analyse the state of the art and discuss future scenarios. Chairs are also planning for a thematic special issue in a relevant international journal.

Example of typical topics for submissions in this workshop are:

real-world planning applications for autonomous and intelligent robots;
optimising behaviour in large scale automated or semi-automated systems;
integrated planning and execution in robotic architectures;
planning domain representations for robotics applications;
P&S methods for optimisation and adaptation in robotics;
mission, path, and motion planning for robots;
planning and coordination methods for multi-robot teams;
mixed-initiative planning and sliding autonomy for robotic systems;
human-aware planning and execution in human-robot interaction;
adversarial action planning in competitive robotic domains;
formal methods for robot planning and control;
challenges and solutions in using P&S technology in robotics;
open problems for P&S in robotics,
benchmark planning domains for robots.

Program for the 16th of June 2022 (All times in UTC)

Invited Talk by Maxim Likhachev, Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute and National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Title: Learning in Search-based Planning for Robotics
Abstract: Search-based Planning refers to planning by constructing a graph from systematic discretization of the state- and action-space of a robot and then employing a heuristic search to find a path from the start to the goal vertex in this graph. In this talk, I will first quickly overview strengths and challenges of this paradigm and briefly mention some of the work my group has done towards addressing these challenges. I will then focus on some of the work my group has recently done on integrating learning into Search-based Planning. In particular, I will present a) a novel class of planning algorithms called Constant-time Motion Planning (CTMP) that use offline preprocessing to ensure that online planning can provably guarantee to return solutions within a (small) constant time for repeated planning tasks, and b) our work towards planning that provides strong guarantees on achieving a task despite using inaccurate models for planning. Finally, I will conclude with my thoughts on outstanding challenges, in particular as related to integrating learning and planning in the context of robotics.
Slides available here

From	To	Title	Authors
12.00	12.10	PlanRob Intro	Iman Awaad, Alberto Finzi, AndreA Orlandini
12.10	12.30	Time-Bounded Large-Scale Mission Planning Under Uncertainty for UV Disinfection	Lara Brudermüller, Raunak Bhattacharyya, Bruno Lacerda and Nick Hawes
12.30	12.50	Probabilistic Planning for AUV Data Harvesting from Smart Underwater Sensor Networks	Matthew Budd, Georgios Salavasidis, Izzat Kamarudzaman, Catherine Harris, Alexander Phillips, Paul Duckworth, Nick Hawes and Bruno Lacerda.
12.50	13.10	Towards Using Promises for Multi-Agent Cooperation in Goal Reasoning	Daniel Swoboda, Till Hofmann, Tarik Viehmann and Gerhard Lakemeyer.
13.10	13.30	Improving Task Planning Knowledge Robustness for Autonomous Robots	Hadeel Jazzaa, Thomas McCluskey and David Peebles.
13.30	13.50	Towards an Easy Use Case Implementation in Social Robotics	Alba Gragera, Carmen Díaz de Mera, Alberto Tudela, Alejandro Cruces, Fernando Fernández and Ángel García-Olaya.
13.50	14.10	Coffee Break
14.10	15.10	Learning in Search-based Planning for Robotics	Maxim Likhachev
15.10	15.30	Understanding Natural Language in Context	Avichai Levy and Erez Karpas.
15.30	15.50	Coffee Break
15.50	16.10	Analysis and Utilisation of Conflicts in Multi-Agent Path Finding	Avgi Kollakidou and Leon Bodenhagen.
16.10	16.30	Learning Path Constraints for UAV Autonomous Navigation under Uncertain GNSS Availability	Marion Zaninotti, Charles Lesire, Yoko Watanabe and Caroline P. Carvalho Chanel.
16.30	16.50	Conflict-Based Multi-Robot Multi-Goal Task and Motion Planning	Junho Lee and Derek Long.
16.50	17.10	Towards Adversarial Geometric Planning	Stefan Edelkamp
17.10	17.30	Asynchronous Motion Planning and Execution for a Dual-Arm Robot	Charles Meehan, Mark Roberts and Laura Hiatt
17.30	18.00	Panel Discussion

Submission Information

There are two types of submissions: short position papers and regular papers. Position papers are a maximum of four pages long while regular papers may be up to ten pages long. Papers may have an additional page containing references. Regular papers may be scheduled with more time in the final program. A poster session may be considered to provide a further presentation opportunity.

The guidelines for formatting are the same as is used for ICAPS 2022 papers (typeset in the AAAI style template), but with the AAAI copyright removed. The papers must be submitted in PDF format via the EasyChair system ( https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=planrob2022).

Please note that papers under review (e.g. which have been submitted to IJCAI-2022) are also welcome, however, in order to avoid potential conflicts, these manuscripts should be prepared as anonymous submissions for a double blind reviewing process.

Accepted papers will be published on the workshop’s website.

The organisers are investigating the availability of journal editors in order to invite a selection of accepted papers from the workshop to a special issue or post-proceedings volume.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 8, 2022 (UTC-12 timezone)
Notification: April 30, 2022
Camera-ready paper submission: June 10, 2022

Organising Committee

Iman Awaad, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Alberto Finzi, Università di Napoli "Federico II", Italy
AndreA Orlandini, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), Italy