Recent Trends in Task and Motion Planning for Robotics: A Survey

Autonomous robots are increasingly served in real-world unstructured human environments with complex long-horizon tasks, such as restaurant serving and office delivery. Task and motion planning (TAMP) is a recent research method in Artificial Intelligence Planning for these applications. TAMP integrates high-level abstract reasoning with the low-level geometric feasibility check and thus is more comprehensive than traditional task planning methods. While regular TAMP approaches are challenged by different types of uncertainties and the generalization of various applications when implemented in real-world scenarios. This article systematically reviews the most relevant approaches to TAMP and classifies them according to their features and emphasis; it categorizes the challenges and presents online TAMP and machine learning-based TAMP approaches for addressing them.