Paper ID: 2202.04611

Task Modifiers for HTN Planning and Acting

Weihang Yuan, Hector Munoz-Avila, Venkatsampath Raja Gogineni, Sravya Kondrakunta, Michael Cox, Lifang He

The ability of an agent to change its objectives in response to unexpected events is desirable in dynamic environments. In order to provide this capability to hierarchical task network (HTN) planning, we propose an extension of the paradigm called task modifiers, which are functions that receive a task list and a state and produce a new task list. We focus on a particular type of problems in which planning and execution are interleaved and the ability to handle exogenous events is crucial. To determine the efficacy of this approach, we evaluate the performance of our task modifier implementation in two environments, one of which is a simulation that differs substantially from traditional HTN domains.

Submitted: Feb 9, 2022