Parallel Scheduling of Planning and Action of a Mobile Robot Based on Planning-Action Consistency

This paper proposes a novel method to schedule parallel execution of planning and action of a mobile robot. The method considers the following two types of parallelism. (1) acting while planning: if a partial planning result can be used to determine feasible actions, such actions can be executed while the planning process is still going. (2) planning while acting: if the result of the current action is (at least partially) predictable, the planning for the next action can start in advance of the completion of the current action. The proposed method uses the notion of planning-action consistency to guide the scheduling. The method has been successfully applied to a mobile robot navigation problem under sensor uncertainty.