Planning Against Nature
Planning Against Nature develops advanced methods for planning and acting in dynamic environments where autonomous agents must remain safe under uncertain external events, including random acts of nature. A representative scenario is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) sampling objects of interest in busy shipping lanes, where every decision must balance mission progress with strict collision-avoidance guarantees throughout execution. The core objective is to generate sequential plans that are guaranteed to achieve the goal while ensuring the AUV will not collide with ships during execution, providing an important safety layer for longer-term autonomy with minimal human intervention, such as ocean or space exploration. To support both research and practical deployment, we are building PANSim, a visualization and simulation tool that makes safe planning strategies easier to explore, compare, and communicate across autonomous robotics, human-robot interaction, and cybersecurity use cases.

Highlights

  • Safe planning in dynamic environments with uncertain external events
  • Sequential plans with formal guarantees of goal achievement and safety
  • Action reversibility for robust adaptation during execution
  • Visualization and simulation support for planning against nature algorithms (PANSim)

Team

Tools

Planning Against Nature Simulator

PANSim provides an interactive environment for testing planning against nature algorithms, inspecting agent behavior step by step, and demonstrating how safety guarantees are preserved in uncertain conditions.

view PANSim source code on GitLab