Automatic planning: Making autonomous behavior possible

Abstract

If an autonomous robot, car, or spacecraft has to decide on the course of action it is going to take, it has to anticipate the effects of its actions and chose them asccordingly. The research area on Automatic Planning is concerned with precisely this problem. In the last fifteen years, a number of significant advances have been made that have boosted the practical efficiency of planning methods and their applicability in, e.g., robotics. This talk will sketch these developments and point out some of the challenges we are facing today.