Consider what the eyes are doing when involved in the solving of a jigsaw puzzle. While the mind is darting about, imagining placement possibilities, considering combinations, and pondering strategies, the eyes too are darting from place to place over the puzzle, examining pieces relevant to a considered placement, checking edges for compatibility, and studying the layout. The eyes are responding to the deliberation of the mind, checking expectations and seeking out necessary information. They are assuring that the deliberation is rooted in the physical reality of the problem. [1]
This thought motivates work [1,2] that I presented yesterday at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robotics workshop at ICLP 2013 in Istanbul (work that results from the current TÜBİTAK-funded leg of my collaboration with Sabancı University Cognitive Robotics laboratory).
There is lots and lots of lovely work on planning for perceiving, planning under uncertainty, and planning in a changing world, topics that are of immediate interest to roboticists. In the current work we take a different angle and, for a while, do away with those considerations and just concentrate on what is the best way of integrating perceptual processing with classical planning, in terms of conceptual simplicity and in terms of efficiency. It is rather preliminary work.
For more information, check out the paper [1] or the slides [2] from yesterday’s talk, where I go into the motivation behind planning for manipulation and why mobile manipulation is a ripe topic; also the graphics are pretty. Unfortunately the movies will only be embedded if you use Libre/Open-Office (there is a PDF version too).
[1] Duff, D. J., Erdem, E., & Patoglu, V. (2013). Integration of 3D Object Recognition and Planning for Robotic Manipulation: A Preliminary Report. ICLP-KRR 2013, Istanbul. Retrieved from http://arxiv-web3.library.cornell.edu/abs/1307.7466
[2] http://files.djduff.net/Presentations/KRRR2013FinalPresentation.tar.gz (slides)