Learning Neuro-Symbolic Abstractions for Robot Planning and Learning

Abstract Although state-of-the-art hierarchical robot planning algorithms allow robots to efficiently compute long-horizon motion plans for achieving user desired tasks, these methods typically rely upon environment-dependent state and action abstractions that need to be hand-designed by experts. On the other hand, non-hierarchical robot planning approaches fail to compute solutions for complex tasks that require reasoning over a long horizon. My research addresses these problems by proposing an approach for learning abstractions and developing hierarchical planners that efficiently use learned abstractions to boost robot planning performance and provide strong guarantees of reliability.