2020 AAAI Tutorial on AI Planning for Robotics with ROSPlan

This tutorial will provide an introduction to AI Planning for robotics, the essentials of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROSPlan. This tutorial will also provide an overview of recent advances in integrating AI Planning and robotics. The main goal is to illustrate this integration, describe how it is beneficial to both communities, as well as to highlight the main challenges and open issues.

The tutorial will cover different aspects of this integration, including modelling domains for robotics, strategies for how to use planning effectively, linking plans to robot actions and sensing, and plan execution in an uncertain environment.

As a result of the tutorial, attendees will be able to immediately experiment with AI Planning techniques in simple robotic simulations.

Tutorial Content

The tutorial will be in three parts.

• The first part will briefly introduce AI Planning, with a focus on modelling and solving AI Planning problems for robotic systems.
• The second part of the tutorial will include a brief introduction to the Robot Operating System (ROS) and some examples of AI Planning solutions for robotic platforms, taken from different teams working on various domains. This part of the tutorial will also include some hands-on exercises that will cover the ROS essentials.
• The final part of the tutorial will cover the integration of planners with ROS using ROSPlan. Topics include planning strategies, plan execution, linking actions to robot skills, and the sensing interface. This part will cover some case studies in ROSPlan (recent research using mobile bases and AUVs) and present hands-on exercises involving robots in simulation.

Resources

• Tutorial slides link to download
• Tutorial materials (launch files, scripts, and demo instructions) link to download
• ROS Melodic http://wiki.ros.org/melodic
• ROSPlan http://kcl-planning.github.io/ROSPlan
• ROSPlan Demos http://kcl-planning.github.io/ROSPlan_demos

In order to take part in the hands-on portion of the tutorial, the attendees will need a laptop with ROS and ROSPlan installed. The required ROS versions are either indigo, kinetic, and melodic (preferred). The hands-on part of the tutorial will also be presented on the main screen for those who do not have their own laptop.

Organisers

Michael Cashmore
Website: http://personal.strath.ac.uk/michael.cashmore
Email: michael.cashmore at strath.ac.uk

Daniele Magazzeni
Website: https://nms.kcl.ac.uk/daniele.magazzeni
Email: daniele.magazzeni at kcl.ac.uk