Spar. A planner that satisfies operational and geometric goals in uncertain environments

In this article, the authors present Spar (simultaneous planner for assembly robots), an implemented system that reasons about high-level operational goals, geometric goals, and uncertainty-reduction goals to create task plans for an assembly robot. These plans contain manipulations to achieve the assembly goals and sensory operations to cope with uncertainties in the robot's environment. High-level goals (which we refer to as operational goals) are satisfied by adding operations to the plan using a nonlinear, constraint-posting method. If Spar cannot find a way to sufficiently reduce uncertainties, it augments the plan with sensing operations to be used to verify the execution of the action and, when possible, posts possible error-recovery plans.