Gayane Kazhoyan

This talk presents an approach to plan, parametrize and execute actions on mobile manipulation robots. The approach utilizes semantic representations to allow the system to scale to large execution domains and enable transfer to novel domains. The examined domains have four main dimensions of variation: (1) the types of the manipulated objects, (2) the configurations of the robot's environment, (3) the specifics of the robot's hardware, and (4) the application-specific requirements. One of the core concepts of the proposed approach are the scalable hierarchical models of robot actions and their implementation as generalized reactive plans. The plans are implemented using the operators of the "robot programming language" CPL, developed specifically for writing robot action plans. In order to generalize the action plans over multiple objects, environments, robot platforms and applications, the concept of symbolic action descriptions is proposed. These are underspecified descriptions of an action that are augmented during execution with subsymbolic parameter values specific to the context at hand. The proposed approach is evaluated on multiple physical and simulated robots. The demonstration applications involve variations of mobile pick and place actions and opening / closing doors and drawers in the robot's environment.