NSF/NRI-sponsored Workshop Report: Robot Planning in the Real World: Research Challenges and Opportunities

Endowing robots with the ability to plan their actions and motions will enable robots to assist people with a wider range of tasks in the real world. Robot planning can improve a robot’s usability and capabilities for a variety of applications, from manufacturing to medicine to home assistance to transportation to disaster response. Recent years have seen significant technical progress that has resulted in planners for such challenging tasks as driving, flying, walking, and manipulating objects. However, robots that have been commercially deployed in the real world typically have no or minimal planning capability. In October 2013, a workshop was held with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Robotics Initiative (NRI) to discuss how the research community can help robot planning mature to enable wider real-world deployment. In this report, we highlight key conclusions from the workshop and also include an appendix with individual position statements from the attendees of the workshop. This report summarizes opportunities and key challenges in robot planning and includes challenge problems identified in the workshop that can help guide future research towards making robot planning deployable in the real world.