Adapting the Contact Migration Policy Algorithm to Dynamic Planning in Phoenix

摘要

The contact migration policy (Grupen 1991) is a reactive approach to constraining(grasping) a rigid body that incrementally constructs a stationary process model of the body in order to refine the grasp. The algorithm employed has many of the characteristics of anytime algorithm (Dean and Boddy 1988), and is therefore an attractive candidate for real-time applications such as positioning bulldozers in the Phoenix fire-fighting simulation. However, we have found that several of the assumptions underlying this algorithm do not hold in the Phoenix environment, so that such a purely reactive control mechanism is inadequate in Phoenix. Based on these findings, and on a broader survey of the application of reactivity in robotic systems, we argue for the mixture of reactive and deliberative (or predictive) mechanisms to coordinate the fire-fighting activities of Phoenix agents.