Autonomous Robot Task Execution in Flexible Manufacturing: Integrating PDDL and Behavior Trees in ARIAC 2023

The Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC) was established to advance flexible manufacturing, aiming to increase the agility of robotic assembly systems in unstructured and dynamic industrial environments. ARIAC 2023 introduced eight agility challenges involving faulty parts, flipped parts, faulty grippers, robot malfunctions, sensor blackouts, high-priority orders, insufficient parts, and human safety. Given the unpredictability of these scenarios, it is impractical to develop a specific strategy for each possible situation. To address these issues, this paper presents a hierarchical framework for autonomous robotic task generation and execution in dynamic scenarios. The framework is divided into a task level and an execution level. Initially, an immediate task management strategy is adopted at the task level, which reasonably decomposes dynamic tasks and allocates short-term tasks to the floor robot and ceiling robot. Later, at the execution level, each robot is designed with an agent architecture that combines PDDL planning with the quick response of behavior trees. Finally, the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed framework were thoroughly validated in ARIAC 2023.