A system and a method are disclosed that provide plans for autonomous machines such as humanoid robots to perform indoor tasks. Human subjects contribute plans to a knowledge database. Information in the knowledge database is pre-processed to identify task steps and characterize them as action-object pairs, from which a plan database is created. A discriminative technique uses hierarchical agglomerative clustering to select an existing plan from the plan database. A generative technique formulates new plans from the plan database using first-order Markov chains, and may take into account information about the operational environment. Experimentation and evaluation by human subjects confirm the efficacy of both techniques.
BUILDING PLANS FOR HOUSEHOLD TASKS FROM DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE