Reactive Integrated Mission and Motion Planning for Mobile Robotic Manipulators

Formal design of integrated task and motion planning of mobile manipulators in a common workspace, where other agents can also manipulate objects in the workspace, is a challenging research question due to the tight coupling between agents, dynamic environments, and the complexity of mission specifications. We are therefore motivated to propose a multi-layered reactive integrated mission and motion planning for mobile-robotic manipulator systems that are operating in a partially known environment. At the high-level, it receives high-level mission specifications that are expressed in linear temporal logic, and a mission planner constructs a symbolic two-player game between the robots and their environment to synthesize a strategy that adapts to changes in the workspace imposed by other robots. A bilateral synergistic layer is developed to map the designed mission plan to an integrated task and motion planner, which constructs a set of robot tasks to move the objects according to the mission strategy. In the low-level planning stage, verifiable motion controllers are designed that can be incrementally composed to guarantee a safe motion planning for each high-level induced task.