Task planning in robotics: an empirical comparison of PDDL- and ASP-based systems

Robots need task planning algorithms to sequence actions toward accomplishing goals that are impossible through individual actions. Off-the-shelf task planners can be used by intelligent robotics practitioners to solve a variety of planning problems. However, many different planners exist, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and there are no general rules for which planner would be best to apply to a given problem. In this study, we empirically compare the performance of state-of-the-art planners that use either the planning domain description language (PDDL) or answer set programming (ASP) as the underlying action language. PDDL is designed for task planning, and PDDL-based planners are widely used for a variety of planning problems. ASP is designed for knowledge-intensive reasoning, but can also be used to solve task planning problems. Given domain encodings that are as similar as possible, we find that PDDL-based planners perform better on problems with longer solutions, and ASP-based planners are better on tasks with a large number of objects or tasks in which complex reasoning is required to reason about action preconditions and effects. The resulting analysis can inform selection among general-purpose planning systems for particular robot task planning domains.