Reward-Guided RRT* for Budgeted Task and Motion Planning

Overview & Synopsis

Robotic missions involving spatially distributed tasks often require jointly selecting rewarding locations and planning feasible motions under limited travel budgets. This paper proposes Reward-Guided RRT*, a new sampling-based framework that constructs a budget-feasible mission through a sequence of locally joint task-selection-and-motion-planning stages, evaluated directly in the continuous state space, without requiring a precomputed task-transition graph. The method incrementally builds a mission using reward-guided RRT* searches, while a return-feasibility procedure ensures that each selected task can be visited without violating the mission budget. Experiments with increasing obstacle complexity and number of tasks show solutions comparable to VNS-PRM* while requiring substantially fewer sampled states. We also extend the framework to Dubins steering and evaluate it in CoppeliaSim with a scaled car-like robotic platform, demonstrating its ability to incorporate vehicle kinematic constraints.