We describe a planner that participates in the Probabilistic Planning Track of the 2004 International Planning Competition. Our planner integrates two approaches to solving Markov decision processes with large state spaces. State abstraction is used to avoid evaluating states individually. Forward search from a start state, guided by an admissible heuristic, is used to avoid evaluating all states.

Non-determinism is often caused by infrequent errors that make otherwise deterministic actions fail. In this paper, we introduce fault tolerant planning to address this problem. An n-fault tolerant plan is guaranteed to recover from up to n errors occurring during its execution. We show how optimal n-fault tolerant plans can be generated via the strong universal planning algorithm. This algorit...

Planning motion is an essential component for any autonomous robotic system. An intelligent agent must be able to efficiently plan collision-free paths in order to move through its world. Despite its importance, this problem is PSPACE-Hard which means that even planning motions for simple robots is computationally difficult. State-of-the-art approaches trade completeness (always able to provide...

Plastic changes of saccades (i.e., following saccadic adaptation) do not transfer between oppositely directed saccades, except when multiple directions are trained simultaneously, suggesting a saccadic planning in retinotopic coordinates. Interestingly, a recent study in human healthy subjects revealed that after an adaptive increase of rightward-scanning saccades, both leftward and rightward d...

The application of autonomous guided vehicles to well-structured industrial sites requires considerably more than a path planning algorithm onboard each vehicle. Issues such as task planning, vehicle routing and vehicle-vehicle interactions predominate in determining the overall system ability. We exhibit a mathematical model of a multiple vehicle system, which has similarities to the Timed Tra...

The thesis presents a novel set-theoretic formalization of (propositional) hybrid planning – a planning framework that fuses Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning with Partial-Order Causal-Link (POCL) planning. Several sub classes thereof are identified that capture well-known problems such as HTN planning and POCL planning. For these problem classes, the complexity of the plan-existence pro...

While clinical neurosurgery has benefited from the advent of frameless image guidance for over three decades, the translation of image guided technologies to abdominal surgery, and more specifically liver resection, has been far more limited. Fundamentally, the workflow, complexity, and presentation have confounded development. With the first real efforts in translation beginning at the turn of...