Integrating Planning and Execution for Sensor-Based Robots

We are interested in developing planning techniques that are appropriate to control robots in real-time. To be more specific, we want to enable robots to navigate safely in environments with an arbitrary number of moving obstacles and to perform assigned tasks. We want to enable robots to avoid obstacles even when obstacles move on unknown trajectories and with unknown velocities. Due to the nature of the problem complete planning cannot be done in advance. However, some planning needs to be done to guarantee that the robot will eventually reach its destination and perform its task. Task level planning is needed for the robot to perform meaningful tasks, but planning cannot be done without some knowledge of the environment that needs to be gathered by sensors. In this paper we describe how to integrate planning with sensing and execution.