Towards focused plan monitoring: a technique and an application to mobile robots

Until recently techniques for AI plan generation relied on highly re strictive assumptions that were almost always violated in real world environments consequently robot designers adopted reactive architectures and avoided AI plan ning techniques Some recent research e orts have focused on obviating such as sumptions by developing techniques that enable the generation and execution of plans in dynamic uncertain environments In this paper we discuss one such tech nique rationale based monitoring originally introduced by Veloso Pollack and Cox and describe our use of it in a simple mobile robot environment We review the original approach describe how it can be adapted for a causal link planner and provide experimental results demonstrating that it can lead to improved plans without consuming excessive overhead We also describe our use of rationale based monitoring in a mobile robot o ce assistant project currently in progress