Extending Knowledge-Level Contingent Planning for Robot Task Planning

We present a set of extensions to the knowledge-level PKS (Planning with Knowledge and Sensing) planner, aimed at improving its ability to generate plans in real-world robotics domains. These extensions include a facility for integrating externally-defined reasoning processes in PKS (e.g., invoking a motion planner), an interval-based fluent representation for capturing the effects of noisy sensors and effectors, and an application programming interface (API) to facilitate software integration on robot platforms. We demonstrate our techniques in three simple robot domains, which show their applicability to a broad range of robot planning applications involving incomplete knowledge, real-world geometry, and multiple robots and sensors.