TOWARD A GOAL-BASED MISSION PLANNING CAPABILITY Using PDDL Based Automated Planners

This paper proposes a generic goal-based mission planning framework which provides art integration environment to support evaluation of existing planning and task assignment technologies. The framework facilitates planning across a team of heterogeneous assets with a distributed capability for generating plans to collaboratively achieve goals. A human operator assigns a team with a top-level goal which the framework then decomposes into a list of tasks that can either be tackled by an individual asset or collectively by a sub-team of assets with the appropriate capabilities. Each asset can generate individual plans with knowledge of the current world state and a goal state. A selection of candidate planners are investigated using the framework including a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planner for goal decomposition and a Partial Ordered PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) Planner for action-based plan generation. The developed framework is applied to a search-and-rescue scenario requiting a team of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) to search a specified area of operation.