Goal accomplishment tracking for automatic supervision of plan execution

It is common practice to break down plans into a series of goals or sub-goals in order to facili- tate plan execution, thereby only burdening the individual agents responsible for their execu- tion with small, easily achievable objectives at any one time, or providing a simple way of shar- ing these objectives amongst a group of these agents. Ensuring that plans are executed cor- rectly is an essential part of any team manage- ment. To allow proper tracking of an agent's progress through a pre-planned set of goals, it is imperative to keep track of which of these goals have already been accomplished. This centralised approach is essential when the agent is part of a team of humans and/or robots, and goal accomplishment is not always being tracked at a low level. This paper presents a framework for an automated supervision sys- tem to keep track of changes in world states so as to chart progress through a pre-planned set of goals. An implementation of this framework on a mobile service robot is presented, and ap- plied in an experiment which demonstrates its feasibility.