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We describe a hierarchical planning system and its application to robotic manipulation. The novel features of the system are: 1) it finds high-quality kinematic solutions to task-level problems; 2) it takes advantage of subtask-specific irrelevance information, reusing optimal solutions to state-abstracted subproblems across the search space. We also discuss ongoing work to speed up the system, by exploiting "angelic" approximate models of the high-level actions involved.