Integration of Online Learning into HTN Planning for Robotic Tasks

This paper extends hierarchical task network (HTN) planning with lightweight learning, considering that in robotics, actions have a non-zero probability of failing. Our work applies to A*-based HTN planners with lifting. We prove that the planner finds the plan of maximal expected utility, while retaining its lifting capability and efficient heuristic-based search. We show how to learn the probabilities online, which allows a robot to adapt by replanning on execution failures. The idea behind this work is to use the HTN domain to constrain the space of possibilities, and then to learn on the constrained space in a way requiring few training samples, rendering the method applicable to autonomous mobile robots.