From Reals to Logic and Back: Inventing Symbolic Vocabularies, Actions, and Models for Planning from Raw Data

Hand-crafted, logic-based state and action representations have been widely used to overcome the intractable computational complexity of long-horizon robot planning problems, including task and motion planning problems. However, creating such representations requires experts with strong intuitions and detailed knowledge about the robot and the tasks it may need to accomplish in a given setting. Removing this dependency on human intuition is a highly active research area. This paper presents the first approach for autonomously learning generalizable, logic-based relational representations for abstract states and actions starting from unannotated high-dimensional, real-valued robot trajectories. The learned representations constitute auto-invented PDDL-like domain models. Empirical results in deterministic settings show that powerful abstract representations can be learned from just a handful of robot trajectories; the learned relational representations include but go beyond classical, intuitive notions of high-level actions; and that the learned models allow planning algorithms to scale to tasks that were previously beyond the scope of planning without hand-crafted abstractions.