A Task and Motion Approach to the Development of Planning
- João Loula, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Kelsey Allen, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Josh Tenenbaum, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
AbstractDevelopmental psychology presents us with a puzzle: though children are remarkably apt at planning their actions, they suffer from surprising yet consistent shortcomings. We argue that these patterns of triumph and failure can be broadly captured by the framework of task and motion planning, where plans are hybrid entities consisting of both a structured, symbolic skeleton and a continuous, low-level trajectory. As a proof of concept, we model two case studies from the tool use literature and show how their results can be understood by the interaction of symbolic and continuous plans.