Rationale-based Visual Planning Monitors

In this paper, we introduce a new technique for planning in a world under continuous change. Our approach is to make vision sensitive to relevant changes in the environment that can affect plans and goals. For this purpose, we applied a rationalebased monitor technique to the SHOP hierarchical planner. SHOP generates plan monitors that interact with a vision system and react only to those environmental changes that bear on current planning decisions. Thus when the monitors detect these changes, they execute specific plan transformations as needed. We also present MIDCA 1.3 which uses the extended version of SHOP and the rationale-based monitors. MIDCA communicates with a Baxter humanoid robot to accomplish a goal in a dynamic environment using the monitors to focus vision and adapt plans. An experiment in a blocks world demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.