ABSTRACT
The potential of Al planning for building assistance systems is obvious. In particular, planning can be both a purpose and a means in assistance systems: a purpose whenever the task requiring assistance is a genuine planning task, and a means whenever an assistance task or property requires some internal planning. Early work in planning was heavily influenced by the STRIPS/SHAKEY experiment: Given a description of the recent state of the world, a description of desired facts to be made true, and descriptions of executable actions in the world, the STRIPS planner generated a sequence of actions to be executed by the autonomous robot SHAKEY. When Al planning was in its infancy, planning systems were mostly experimental in character. In general, assistance requires planning abilities in domains that are demanding for planning techniques, involving, for example, various facets of uncertainty, cooperation between and coordination of different planners and agents, assessment of the planner’s own competence, and timely responses.
