Where to Place a Pile?

When planning missions for autonomous machines in real-world scenarios, such as open-pit mining, painting, or harvesting, it is important to consider how the machines will alter the working environment during their operations. Traditional planning methods treat such changes, like piles built during drilling, as constraints given to the planner that depend on the machine's trajectory. The goal is to find a trajectory that satisfies these constraints. However, our approach formulates the planning problem as finding optimal positions for changes, such as piles, along the machine's trajectory. We propose a heuristic solver and provide extensive experimental evaluations.