A Task Planning System of a Steward Robot with a State Partitioning Technique

상태 분할 기법을 이용한 집사 로봇의 작업 계획 시스템

This paper presents a task planning system for a steward robot, which has been developed as an interactive intermediate agent between an end-user and a complex smart home environment called the ISH (Intelligent Sweet Home) at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). The ISH is a large-scale robotic environment with various assistive robots and home appliances for independent living of the elderly and the people with disabilities. In particular, as an approach for achieving human-friendly human-robot interaction, we aim at 'simplification of task commands' by the user. In this sense, a task planning system has been proposed to generate a sequence of actions effectively for coordinating subtasks of the target subsystems from the given high-level task command. Basically, the task planning is performed under the framework of STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver) representation and the split planning method. In addition, we applied a state-partitioning technique to the backward split planning method to reduce computational time. By analyzing the obtained graph, the planning system decomposes an original planning problem into several independent sub-problems, and then, the planning system generates a proper sequence of actions. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we deal with a scenario of a planning problem in the ISH.