Motivation: planning vs. programming

How to manage the conceptual complexity of devising controllers?

1) provide languages with which a programmer can specify a control program with relative easy, using high-level actions as primitives.

2) specify only goals (or an objective function) and use a planner to find courses of action that achieve those goals (or maximize the objective function).

Planning:

• flexibility (+)
• generality: a controller can be specified by giving goals or objective function (+)
• computational complexity: scales poorly to complex tasks and environments (-)

Programming.

• performance of programmed controllers(+)
• difficult to take into account possible contingencies (-)
• the programmer cannot easily determine an optimal behavior (-)