Using Abstraction to Interleave Planning and Execution

Abstract

Abstraction is a technology that enables interleaved planning and execution, the much sought-after quality of a robot architecture that can both plan and act (and plan and act and plan...) in short order. This paper presents a definition for Abstraction and for an architecture composed of a collection of abstractions, or an Abstraction System. We span both the theoretical extreme of formally defining abstraction and the empirical extreme of implementing an Abstraction System on a real-world robot and collecting compelling experimental results.