On Optimal Integrated Task and Motion Planning with Applications to Tractor-Trailers

Sammanfattning: An important aspect in autonomous systems is the ability of a system to plan before acting. This includes both high-level task planning to determine what sequence of actions to take in order for the system to reach a goal state, as well as low-level motion planning to detail how to perform the actions required.While it is sometimes possible to plan hierarchically, i.e., to first compute a task plan and then compute motion plans for each action in the task plan, there are also many problem instances where this approach fails to find a feasible plan as not all task plans lead to motion-planning problems that have feasible solutions. For this reason, it is desirable to solve the two problems jointly rather than sequentially. Additionally, it is often desirable to find plans that optimize a performance measure, such as the energy used, the length of the path travelled by the system or the time required. This thesis focuses on the problem of finding joint task and motion plans that optimize a performance measure.The first contribution is a method for solving a joint task and motion planning problem, that can be formulated as a traveling salesman problem with dynamic obstacles and motion constraints, to resolution optimality. The proposed method uses a planner comprising two nested graph-search planners. Several different heuristics are considered and evaluated.The second contribution is a method for solving a joint task and motion planning problem, in the form of a rearrangement problem for a tractor-trailer system, to resolution optimality. The proposed method combines a task planner with motion planners, all based on heuristically guided graph search, and uses branch-and-bound techniques in order to improve the efficiency of the search algorithm.The final contribution is a method for improving task and motion plans for rearrangement problems using optimal control. The proposed method takes inspiration from finite-horizon optimal control and decomposes the optimization problem into several smaller optimization problems rather than solving one larger optimization problem. Compared to solving the original larger optimization problem, it is demonstrated that this can lead to reduced computation time without any significant decrease in solution quality.