In the agricultural field, interests in research using robots for fruit harvesting are continuously increasing. Dual arm manipulators are promising because of its abilities like task-distribution and role-sharing. To operate it efficiently, the task sequence must be planned adequately. In our previous study, a collision-free path planning method based on a genetic algorithm is proposed for dual arm manipulators doing tasks cooperatively. However, in order to simplify the complicated collision-check problem, the movement between tasks of two robots should be synchronized, and thus there is a problem that the robots must wait and resume their movement. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm that can reduce the total time of the optimal solution obtained by using the previously proposed genetic algorithm. It iteratively desynchronizes the task sequence of two robots and reduces the waiting time. For evaluation, the proposed algorithm is applied to the same work as the previous study. As a result, we can obtain a faster solution having 22.57 s than that of the previous study having 24.081 s. It will be further studied to apply the proposed algorithm to the fruit harvesting.

Object manipulation in cluttered environments remains an open hard problem. In cluttered environments, grasping objects often fails for various reasons. This paper proposes a novel task and motion planning scheme to grasp objects obstructed by other objects in cluttered environments. Task and motion planning (TAMP) aims to generate a sequence of task-level actions where its feasibility is verified in the motion space. The proposed scheme contains an open-loop consisting of three distinct phases: 1) Generation of a task-level skeleton plan with pose references, 2) Instantiation of pose references by motion-level search, and 3) Re-planning task based on the updated state description. By conducting experiments with simulated robots, we show the high efficiency of our scheme.

This paper presents a task planning system for a steward robot, which has been developed as an interactive intermediate agent between an end-user and a complex smart home environment called the ISH(Intelligent Sweet Home) at KAIST(Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). The ISH is a large-scale robotic environment with various assistive robots and home appliances for independent living of the elderly and the people with disabilities. In particular, as an approach for achieving human-friendly human-robot interaction, we aim at 'simplification of task commands' by the user. In this sense, a task planning system has been proposed to generate a sequence of actions effectively for coordinating subtasks of the target subsystems from the given high-level task command. Basically, the task planning i s performed under the framework of STRIPS(Standard Research Institute Problem Solver) representation and the split planning method. In addition, we applied a state-partitioning technique to the backward split planning method to reduce computational time. By analyzing the obtained graph, the planning system decomposes an original planning problem into several independent sub-problems, and then, the planning system generates a proper sequence of actions. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we deal with a scenario of a planning problem in the ISH.

Hierarchical Planning based on Abstraction of World Elements and Operators(HiPAWO) is proposed for mobile robots task planning, where abstraction of world elements is used for hierarchical planning and abstraction of operators is used for hierarchical decomposition of abstracted actions. Especially, a hierarchical domain theory based on JAH(Joint of Action Hierarchy)-graph is proposed to improve efficiency of planning, where a number of same actions are included in both adjacent hierarchical levels of domain theories to provide relationships between adjacent hierarchical levels. To show the validities of our proposed HiPAWO, experimental results are illustrated and will be compared with two other classical planning methods.