Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Paterson, James G. (James Gordon)
Other Authors: Brian C. Williams.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93801
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author Paterson, James G. (James Gordon)
author2 Brian C. Williams.
author_facet Brian C. Williams.
Paterson, James G. (James Gordon)
author_sort Paterson, James G. (James Gordon)
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description Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.
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spelling mit-1721.1/938012019-04-12T21:41:16Z Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts Paterson, James G. (James Gordon) Brian C. Williams. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Aeronautics and Astronautics. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 89-91). A wide range of robotic missions contain activities that exhibit looping behaviour. Examples of these activities include picking fruit in agriculture, pick-and-place tasks in manufacturing, or even search patterns in robotic observing missions. These looping activities often have a range of acceptable loop values and a preference function over them. For example, during robotic survey missions, information gain is expected to increase with the number of loops in a search pattern. Since these looping activities also take time, which is typically bounded, there is a challenge of maximizing utility while respecting time constraints. While current scheduling techniques allow us to specify disjunctive temporal constraints and preference over time, they do not allow us to represent looping constraints, or preference over the number of loops. In this thesis, we provide a capability to optimally choose between multiple candidate plans by selecting threads of execution and the number of loops within each activity, while respecting temporal constraints. To achieve this, we first present a new scheduling problem; the looping temporal problem with preference (LTPP), as a formalism for encoding scheduling problems that contain looping activities, and provide an algorithm to solve it. The LTPP expresses temporal and looping constraints in a compact form, while adding a preference function on the number of loops between two temporal events. Second, we enable hierarchical temporal planning over looping activities through an optimal temporal planner that uses the LTPP scheduler at its core. This planner takes a looping temporal plan network (LTPN) as an input and produces a consistent, least-commitment temporal plan that optimizes the global value of all preference functions. This least-commitment plan can then be dispatched to the robot online allowing for robustness to temporal disturbances during execution. We demonstrate the capabilities of these algorithms on problems from the search-and-rescue domain. by James G. Paterson. S.M. 2015-02-05T18:22:42Z 2015-02-05T18:22:42Z 2014 2014 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93801 900610495 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 91 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Paterson, James G. (James Gordon)
Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title_full Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title_fullStr Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title_full_unstemmed Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title_short Hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
title_sort hierarchical planning and scheduling of looping a activities for robotic scouts
topic Aeronautics and Astronautics.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/93801
work_keys_str_mv AT patersonjamesgjamesgordon hierarchicalplanningandschedulingofloopingaactivitiesforroboticscouts