A Robust and Fast Action Selection Mechanism for Planning

The ability to plan and react in dynamic environments is central to intelligent behavior yet few algorithms have managed to combine fast planping with a robust execution. In this paper we develop one such algorithm by looking at planning as real time search. For that we develop a variation of Korf’s Learning Real Time A* algorithm together with a suitable heuristic function. The resulting algorithm interleaves lookshead with execution and never builds a plan. It is an action selection mechanism that decides at each time point what to do next. Yet it solves hard planning problems faster than any domain independent planning algorithm known to us, including the powerful SAT planner recently introduced by Kautz and Selman. It also works in the presence of perturbations and noise, and can be given a fixed time window to operate. We illustrate each of these features by running the algorithm on a number of benchmark problems. 1