A Survey on Task and Motion Planning

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Task and Motion Planning"

by

Mr. Hao ZHANG


Abstract:

TAMP (Task And Motion Planning) is the key step towards fully autonomous 
robots. The AI community have produced loads of work on symbolic 
representation of the events in the world and corresponding planning 
algorithms to solve discretely represented tasks, enables intelligent 
behavior on complex tasks. The robotics community presents solutions to 
represent the world geometrically and algorithms to search for 
trajectories that controls physical robot, so that the robot can safely 
execute motions. A natural focus of task and motion planning is the 
interaction between discrete and continuous world. A taxonomy of TAMP 
methods is provided in this survey.

As useful as this taxonomy goes, the current assumptions leave a gap 
between what works in theory and what works in reality. A set of research 
questions are then raised to take a closer look at these assumptions and 
try to relax each of them, so the robot can gain the ability to deal with 
uncertainty from perception and execution, plan online while taking 
execution into account, and form the right abstraction that best 
represents the world for the task at hand. Last but not the least, real 
world application almost always prefer optimization over satisfiability. 
Plan against a cost function instead of a specified goal state largely 
expands the type of work robot can do. Optimize over time makes a key 
different between whether a job is better assigned to robot or human. The 
question of how to achieve a real-world goal within given time can be 
looked at from two angles, where one can speed up the computation or 
motion execution itself, or looking at the temporal aspect of both 
planning and acting, thinking parallel instead of sequential, and then 
come up with the best overall result.


Date:  			Tuesday, 7 June 2022

Time:                  	11:00am - 1:00pm

Zoom Meeting:
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/91482068142?pwd=ajZZTFNlUzlzanRGaHdOa2FTaGxJdz09

Committee Members:	Prof. Qiang Yang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Lei Chen (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Fangzhen Lin (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Ming Liu


**** ALL are Welcome ****