A generic framework for anytime execution-driven planning in robotics

Robotic missions require to implement various functionalities in order to link reactive functions at actuators and sensors level to deliberative functions like vision, supervision and planning at decisional level. All these functionalities must be versatile and generic enough to interact differently according to the missions while minimizing recoding effort. Moreover, deliberative functions like automated planning consume lots of memory and CPU time and usually complete in time incompatible with robotic missions' durations. Thus, we present a new generic and anytime planning concept for modular robotic architectures, which manages multiple planning requests at a time, solved in background, while allowing for reactive execution of planned actions at the same time. Different planners based on various formalisms and data structures can be plugged to the planning component without changing its behavior nor its code, facilitating reusability and validation of the component. We highlight the versatility of our concept on different use cases; then we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in terms of mission duration and success, compared with traditional plan-then-execute approaches; we finally present a search and rescue mission by an autonomous rotorcraft solved with our paradigm, that cannot be tackled by traditional approaches.