Dear community,

At some point, I would like to integrate planner9 [1,2], my HTN planner, 
into ROS. At that occasion, it would be nice if planner9's node could 
conform to a standard HTN-planner interface. I have been looking for one 
but did not found any. Currently planner9 can distribute search on 
multiple nodes using avahi and be called using D-Bus. The interface to 
D-Bus could be a source of inspiration (at least it works for me), here 
is a rosmsged version:

* HTN/Atom.msg:
String relation
uint32[] params
String value

* HTN/State.msg:
Atom[] atoms

* HTN/Task.msg:
String head
uint32[] params

* HTN/Plan.msg:
Task[] actions

* HTN/StartPlanning.msg:
String[] constants # for debug output
State initial_state
Task task # task to do

* HTN/PlanningSucceeded:
Plan plan
uint32 total_iteration_count

* HTN/PlanningFailed:
uint32 total_iteration_count

These messages assume:
* constants are represented by integers
* relations are represented by strings
* values are represented by strings
* the goal is specified as a task
* the planner node has a description of the planning domain, and only 
problems are specified dynamically.


What do you think? Are there people interested in such interface? Should 
we make a REP?

Kind regards,

Stéphane


[1] http://gitorious.org/planner9
[2] http://tinyurl.com/planner9-paper

-- 
Dr Stéphane Magnenat
http://stephane.magnenat.net