Automated Planning Domain Inference for Task and Motion Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated method for inferring planning domains in task and motion planning using minimal demonstrations, deep learning, and search algorithms, reducing manual effort and improving efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that automates domain inference from few demonstrations, combining deep learning and search to enhance TAMP frameworks.

Findings

Outperforms behavior cloning baselines in planning performance

Reduces computational costs and data requirements

Enables robots to handle complex tasks more efficiently

Abstract

Task and motion planning (TAMP) frameworks address long and complex planning problems by integrating high-level task planners with low-level motion planners. However, existing TAMP methods rely heavily on the manual design of planning domains that specify the preconditions and postconditions of all high-level actions. This paper proposes a method to automate planning domain inference from a handful of test-time trajectory demonstrations, reducing the reliance on human design. Our approach incorporates a deep learning-based estimator that predicts the appropriate components of a domain for a new task and a search algorithm that refines this prediction, reducing the size and ensuring the utility of the inferred domain. Our method is able to generate new domains from minimal demonstrations at test time, enabling robots to handle complex tasks more efficiently. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms behavior cloning baselines, which directly imitate planner behavior, in terms of planning performance and generalization across a variety of tasks. Additionally, our method reduces computational costs and data amount requirements at test time for inferring new planning domains.