Kostas Bekris participated in the “Exhibition and Benchmarking of Task-Motion Planners” workshop taking place in conjunction with RSS 2018 on the CMU campus in Pittsburgh, PA. The organizers were Neil T. Dantam, Fabien Lagriffoul and Lydia E. Kavraki. This workshop aimed to improve comparisons of TAMP approaches by making explicit differing assumptions, identifying improvements to the benchmark set, and fixing suitable, standard formats for TAMP problems.
Link to workshop: http://www.neil.dantam.name/2018/rss-tmp-workshop/
The thesis of the talk was that one promising way to achieve high-quality paths and good solution times in TAMP is to reason about the underlying combinatorial structure of specific challenges so as to:
a) define a minimal representation for the target problem, and
b) generate effective domain-informed heuristics.
Then, the resulting domain-informed representation and heuristics can be used to guide integrated planning tools, which can potentially view TAMP as a single planning problem in a common representation. The talk covered examples of TAMP domains were the study of the combinatorial structure of the problem has resulted in efficient algorithms: Rearrangement Planning and Multi-arm Planning.
The slides of the presentation are available upon request.