Gerard Canals, a recognized robotics expert, presented a captivating seminar at IFRoS Master. His deep insights and practical expertise revealed the complex challenges and innovative solutions that determine the future of robotic automation.
Various topics were discussed during the seminar, including:
- Task planning for robotics. Why is it useful and what are its challenges? Canals demonstrated why robotics are particularly hard to plan, but he also showed the benefits of using planning approaches in robotics domains.
- Introduction to Task planning. In this case, Canals talked about problem definition, types of planning, heuristics and PDDL. He also highlighted how the planning problem is formally defined and solved, and how we can also reason with numerical variables, as well as how to handle time.
- Different topics on plan execution. Canals highlighted that in robotics we do not stop when the plan is found. Instead, we try to execute it. Related to this, he also developed the idea that plan execution not only brings a series of challenges but also new opportunities.
- Hands-on modelling of planning problems with PDDL. At the end, Canals showed how to represent the problems and run planners to find solutions to them.
To conclude, Canal’s seminar shed light on the intricate world of robotics planning and its impact on automation’s future.