Planning Competition for Logistics Robots in Simulation
Tim Niemueller Erez Karpas
RWTH Aachen University
niemueller@kbsg.rwth-aachen.de
Tiago Vaquero
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
tvaquero@mit.edu
Abstract
Robots gain more capabilities every year, yet the use of plan-
ning methods to determine the overall behavior is still the
exception rather than the norm. A robotics planning compe-
tition (in 2017) could foster mutual and closer cooperation
between the planning and robotics communities. A first do-
main could be based on the RoboCup Logistics League in
simulation. We propose this as a challenge to the planning
and robotics community. We will organize a half-day tuto-
rial in 2016 to introduce the scenario, explain how to use the
simulation, and characterize the planning domain for poten-
tial participants. The purpose of this paper is to explain the
challenge, and serve as grounds for discussion.
Introduction
With robots gaining ever more capabilities, both in terms of
perception and manipulation, and with the desire to solve
tasks of increasing complexity and higher relevance, the de-
sign and composition of robot behavior becomes more com-
plex and tedious. The goal is to automate this process as
much as possible, which would improve longevity, extensi-
bility, and robustness of integrated robot systems.
Planning systems would be a natural component for de-
veloping complex robot behavior. However, such systems
are still the exception rather than the norm in robotics ap-
plications. This is, in part, due to the fact that robotic sys-
tems are often used to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate
specific capabilities like perception or manipulation. On the
other hand, the planning community often use robotics as a
motivation, rather than as a full evaluation testbed. System
integration and actual execution of plans and typical time
constraints encountered in robotic domains are not consid-
ered. An effort is required to ease the integration and make
the communities more accessible towards each other.
To foster closer cooperation among the communities, we
envision a new robotic planning competition in simulation.
Starting out with a specific scenario, we can pave the way for
the development of more integrated systems. The planning
community would benefit from a recent and readily prepared
evaluation robotics testbed to show the relevance and perfor-
mance of their work. For the robotics community, planning
systems would become more accessible building on or in-
trospecting existing integrated systems in a robotics context.
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
karpase@technion.ac.il
Eric Timmons
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
etimmons@mit.edu
Figure 1: RoboCup Logistics League Simulation
As development and maintenance of actual robots is costly
and tedious, the competition will be held in simulation.
This competition builds on the industry-inspired scenario
of the RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) (Niemueller,
Lakemeyer, and Ferrein 2015). Manufacturing industries are
on the brink of widely accepting a new paradigm for orga-
nizing production by introducing perceiving, active, context-
aware, and autonomous systems. This is often referred to
as Industry 4.0 (Kagermann, Wahlster, and Helbig 2013), a
move from static process chains towards more automation
and autonomy. The corner stones for this paradigm shift are
smart factories (Lucke, Constantinescu, and Westkämper
2008), which is a context-aware facility in which manu-
facturing steps are considered as services that can be com-
bined efficiently in (almost) arbitrary ways allowing for
the production of various product types and variants cost-
effectively even in small lot sizes, rather than the more tradi-
tional chains which produce only a small number of product
types at high volumes. Flexible and efficient logistics is cru-
cial in such a scenario. The RCLL models this very task at
a comprehensible and manageable scale. Methods and tech-
niques for planning and reasoning on a factory, robot fleet,
and individual robot levels are highly relevant in this con-
text. The chosen domain may therefore also allow for more
interest from industrial partners.
As a preparation for this competition to take place (in
2017), we will hold a half-day tutorial at ICAPS 2016 to
present the idea, introduce the integrated open-source base
system, and to kickstart interested teams. The purpose of
this paper is to briefly present the challenge and foster dis-
cussion about the best way to proceed with the challenge.
 RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL)
The RCLL (Niemueller, Lakemeyer, and Ferrein 2015) is an
industry-inspired league in RoboCup (Kitano et al. 1997),
an initiative to foster research in the field of robotics and
artificial intelligence. The goal is to organize an efficient
workflow in a simplified virtual factory environment.
The game starts with the exploration phase, lasting four
minutes, where the group of three robots must roam the envi-
ronment and identify the machines and their positions on the
field. To introduce uncertainty and foster the development of
robust and failure tolerant systems, two teams operate on a
common field at the same time. Each team has an exclusive
set of six machines of four different types of Modular Pro- Figure 2: RoboCup Logistics League Finals 2015
duction System (MPS) stations. They are assigned randomly
to 24 zones on the field (position and orientation within zone state estimation system to identify the current state of the
is randomized). The playing field is symmetric along the world. The technology used in each of these elements varies
shorter middle axis to ensure fairness for both teams. In the and the literature is vast. The integration of these compo-
production phase the robots need to coordinate to efficiently nents in a robotics application is an interesting and real chal-
operate their machines to refine workpieces to deliverable lenge in both planning and robotics communities.
products according to randomized orders that are posted dy-
namically at run-time. A product consists of a cylindrical Robotics Planning Competition (RPC)
base element, zero or up to three colored rings, and a gray
To bring the robotics and planning communities closer and
or black cap (order of colors is relevant). These elements
to foster the integration of planning approaches in more
can be obtained at different machine types. For further de-
robotic systems, we propose to organize a Robotics Planning
tails we refer to Niemueller, Lakemeyer, and Ferrein (2015)
Competition. Acquiring and maintaining one or more robots
and RCLL Technical Committee (2016). Figure 2 shows the
is often prohibitively costly and particularly for many mem-
finals of the RoboCup 2015 competition in Hefei, China.
bers of the planning community undesirable. Therefore, this
The game is controlled by the referee box (refbox), a soft-
robotics competition should take place in simulation. An
ware component which provides agency to the environment.
open source (base) system will ensure that participants can
The simulation (Figure 1) uses the exact same controller and
re-create the used infrastructure with reasonable effort.
therefore provides reactions similar to the real world. Af-
The idea for the competition was conceived during a dis-
ter the game is started, no manual interference is allowed,
cussion in the Workshop on Planning in Robotics at ICAPS
robots receive goals only from the refbox and must act com-
2015. It was observed that even in this focused work-
pletely autonomously. The robots communicate among each
shop, papers used robotics mostly as a motivation, rather
other and with the refbox through WiFi. Communication
than as an integration and evaluation testbed, therefore not
delays and interruptions are common and must be handled
producing results necessary to attract more members of
gracefully – they are also modeled in the simulation.
the robotics community. Based on the presentation of the
RCLL (Niemueller, Lakemeyer, and Ferrein 2015) it was
Task-Level Executive deemed to be a suitable candidate. The authors do not claim
For a robot to fulfill a certain task, a component is necessary that this is and should be the one and only simulated robotics
that composes basic skills or actions to form a coherent be- domain for such a competition. However, it is readily avail-
havior – this is the task-level executive. Typical approaches able and a good match for a start. The topic is also relevant
can be roughly divided in three categories (Niemueller, for future industrial production, as demonstrated by Festo as
Lakemeyer, and Ferrein 2015): state machine based con- the industrial partner for the RCLL (Niemueller et al. 2013).
trollers like SMACH (Bohren and Cousins 2010), rea-
soning systems from Procedural Reasoning Systems (In- Challenges
grand et al. 1996) or rule-based agents (Niemueller, Lake- The main challenges in the Logistics Robot Planning Com-
meyer, and Ferrein 2013) to more formal approaches like petition (LRPC) are short-term planning, multi-robot coor-
G OLOG (Levesque et al. 1997), and finally planning systems dination, run-time integration, and dynamic adaptation. As
with varying complexity and modeling requirements. Hy- outlined in (Niemueller, Lakemeyer, and Ferrein 2015) var-
brid systems may integrate aspects of more categories, e.g. ious options for planning exist. The domain can be modeled
PDDL-based planning and G OLOG (Hofmann et al. 2016). towards local-scope (single robot) or global-scope (overall
The task-level executive is usually composed of a model- fleet) planning, in a centralized or distributed fashion, e.g.,
ing framework to design the domain model, constraints, and allowing to employ something like plan merging (Alami et
mission goals; a generative planner to perform mission plan- al. 1998; Joyeux et al. 2009), and producing either incremen-
ning or a reasoning system for action selection; a dispatcher tal or complete plans. The most successful strategy in 2014
to send task commands to robots; an execution monitoring and 2015 was based on local-scope, distributed, incremen-
system to overview progress and detect disturbance; and a tal reasoning system (Niemueller, Lakemeyer, and Ferrein
 Task-Level Planning Executive
Task Planner
Goals
Referee Box
Plan Status Plan
Execution
Monitoring System
Behaviors/Skills
Execution Status Execution Request
Robot Software Stack
Behaviors/Skills
Sense Act
Simulation Environment
Agency
Figure 3: Simulation Architecture
2013). However, achieving cooperation among robots must
be encoded explicitly which may cause inefficient interac-
tions and resource usage. Therefore, globally optimizing
planning with intrinsic cooperation seems desirable.
Supply chains describe logistic networks which comprise
interlinked logistic actors, locally in a factory as in the
RCLL, or more generally on a larger scale among factories
and industries. Supply chain optimization (SCO), especially
as observed at the larger scale, is a hard problem (Radzi,
Fox, and Long 2007) showing that the competition will not
only serve as a testbed for integration and evaluation, but
may rather also pose new challenges. Also, the competi-
tion will evolve along the requirements. An alignment with
the RCLL is desirable, for one to encourage members of the
planning community to participate with real robots or col-
laborate with existing teams, for another to foster the accep-
tance of planning techniques in the robotics community. But
the planning competition may choose to alter the scenario,
for example to operate more robots in a larger environment
to scale the problem. This is highly relevant, for example to
look at scenario sizes expected in real industrial contexts.
System Architecture and Components
The competition requires the use of a modular system archi-
tecture that integrates key components for planning, moni-
toring, and adaptation. Figure 3 depicts the architecture that
will be used to operate the robots in the simulation environ-
ment to fulfill the given tasks. In what follows we describe
the main components.
Simulation Environment A complete simulation of the
RCLL environment, depicted in Figure 1, is readily avail-
able (Zwilling, Niemueller, and Lakemeyer 2014) as open
source software.1 The simulation is connected to the Ref-
eree Box (refbox) that provides fully autonomous agency.
Domain model We will provide at least one default domain
model based on PDDL. Models might have different require-
ments in terms of fidelity (e.g., temporal or non-temporal) or
1 3
https://www.fawkesrobotics.org/p/rcll-sim
language (depending on the planner). There is potential for
cooperation with the International Competition on Knowl-
Domain
edge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS).2
Task Planner This is obviously a crucial part for the chal-
Model
lenge and the center piece which we expect teams to modify
or replace. We will provide a reference implementation.
State Execution Monitoring System This component is respon-
Estimator sible for executing a plan and handling action failure, unex-
pected events etc. We will provide a default executive based
on Enterprise Pike (Levine and Williams 2014).
Feedback
Behaviors/Skills We will provide a set of standard behav-
iors — implemented using the Lua-based Behavior En-
gine (Niemueller, Ferrein, and Lakemeyer 2009) — required
to play the game, such as go to a certain place, pick-up a
workpiece, or operate a machine.
Robot Software Stack The base robot system is imple-
mented using the Fawkes Robot Software Framework based
on the publicly released software stack of the Carologistics
RoboCup team (Niemueller, Reuter, and Ferrein 2015). It is
available as open source software.3 Functional components
for navigation, self-localization, and perception will be pro-
vided. This includes a component path-planning (replace-
able in track 2 and 3, see below). Perception will mostly be
provided through ground-truth from the simulation.
Middleware The provided infrastructure is based on the
Fawkes Robot Software Framework. We will additionally
provide a full Robot Operating System (ROS) integration to
allow interfacing with all the components of the architecture,
having Fawkes then only working in the “engine room”.
Competition Tracks
The basic competition will consist of the RoboCup Logistics
League task (RCLL Technical Committee 2016) that has to
be solved with three robots. Games can be played with a
single or two teams at a time (the latter being the official
RCLL game increasing uncertainty). The competition will
provide great flexibility in terms of software and methods
used to perform the task and mission planning. Some ba-
sic tracks provide some rough separation to ensure a proper
comparison of solutions.
For the time being, we will focus on global centralized
planning, that is planning is performed on a single host
for the overall fleet of robots. We will focus on providing
state-of-the-art planners (e.g., PDDL and RMPL planners)
and existing planning architecture (e.g., Enterprise, ROS-
Plan (Cashmore et al. 2015)). A readily integrated base sys-
tem will be provided as an example. We envision a number
of different tracks, distinguished by the amount of influence
the team has on the overall software stack and what com-
ponents may be replaced. These tracks are explicitly up for
discussion with interested teams.
Track 1: Planner Teams may replace the domain model,
task planner, execution monitoring system, and/or the state
estimator.
If the default execution monitoring system is used an ap-
propriate translation of the planner output to the execution
2
https://ickeps2016.wordpress.com/
https://www.fawkesrobotics.org/p/rcll2015-release
monitor input is required and must be provided by the teams.
The interface to the software stack are either Fawkes black-
board interfaces or ROS topics for information retrieval.
To execute actions (if the execution monitor is replaced), a
Fawkes interface or ROS action are provided that takes spe-
cific skill strings for execution.4
We are considering running both a classical and a tempo-
ral track, depending on participant interest.
Track 2: Behaviors and Motion Planning In addition to
the items of track 1, teams may extend or replace the exist-
ing skills (including a different execution engine), and the
motion planning component. If a different skill execution
engine is used, it must either implement the Behavior Engine
interface if the default executive is used, or it must provide
a custom executive as well.
The default motion planning component is based on a
global dynamically generated graph-based planner and a lo-
cal planner implementing collision avoidance (Jacobs et al.
2009). Either component may be replaced by the team in
this track. Note, that the positions of the machines are not
fixed and positions have to be explored during the game.
Track 3: Free Style The team may apply any modification
to the robot software, except anything related to the simu-
lation (this denies at least modifications to models, plugins,
configuration, or refereeing). We intend to provide a simpli-
fied Gazebo-based API that teams can use to integrate with
a software stack of their choice. This track is specifically
targeted towards interested parties from the robotics com-
munity that wants to participate in the challenge.
Conclusion
We have proposed a competition for logistics robots in sim-
ulation to bridge the gap between the planning and robotics
communities. We will hold a half-day tutorial at ICAPS
2016 to introduce the simulation scenario and outline its
planning challenges. The base software and further infor-
mation is provided on the project website.5 This paper and
the tutorial are meant to start the discussion with interested
parties to implement the competition in 2017.
Acknowledgments. T. Niemueller is supported by the
German National Science Foundation (DFG) research unit
FOR 1513 on Hybrid Reasoning for Intelligent Systems
(http://www.hybrid-reasoning.org).
We thank the Carologistics RoboCup Team for their ef-
forts in developing the base system and in particular Fred-
erik Zwilling for countless hours developing the simulation.
We gratefully acknowledge travel funding and equipment
by Festo Didactic SE for the tutorial at ICAPS 2016.
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