A system and a method are disclosed that provide plans for autonomous
machines such as humanoid robots to perform indoor task. Human subjects
contribute plans to a knowledge database. Information in the knowledge
database is pre-processed to identify task steps and characterize them as
action-object pairs, from which a plan database is created. A
discriminative technique uses hierarchical agglomerative clustering to
select an existing plan from the plan database. A generative technique
formulates new plans from the plan database using first-order Markov
chains, and may take into account information about the operational
environment. Experimentation and evaluation by human subjects confirm the
efficacy of both techniques.