Optimization in the Now: Dynamic Peephole Optimization for Hierarchical Planning

For robots to effectively interact with the real world, they will need to perform complex tasks over long time horizons. This is a daunting challenge, but recent advances using hierarchical planning have been able to provide leverage on this problem. Unfortunately, this approach makes no effort to account for the execution cost of an abstract plan and often arrives at poor quality plans. This paper outlines a method for dynamically improving a hierarchical plan during execution. We frame the underlying question as one of evaluating the resource needs of an abstract operator and propose a general way to approach estimating them. We ran experiments in challenging domains and observed up to 30% reduction in execution cost when compared with a standard hierarchical planner.