Integrated Task and Motion Planning for Process-aware Source Seeking

The process-aware source seeking (PASS) problem in flow fields aims to find an informative trajectory to reach an unknown source location while taking the energy consumption in the flow fields into consideration. Taking advantage of the existing methods on flow field partition, this paper formulates this problem as a task and motion planning (TAMP) problem and proposes a bi-level hierarchical planning framework to decouple the planning of inter-region transition and inner-region trajectory by introducing inter-region junctions. An integrated strategy is utilized to enable efficient upper-level planning by investigating the optimal solution of the lower-level planner. The proposed algorithm provides guaranteed convergence of the trajectory, and achieves automatic trade-off between exploration and exploitation, which has been validated by the simulation results.