Abstract
We present a novel hierarchical POMDP framework to solve an object search and delivery task where the agent is given a prior belief about the possible item locations. Solving POMDPs is computationally demanding and, as such, applications have typically been limited to small environments. The proposed hierarchical POMDP framework performs reasoning on multiple spatial scales in order to reduce computation time. The problem is first solved in the top layer of the hierarchy with a coarsely discretized state space. Its solution is refined in the lower layers with increasing resolution. Three different methods for propagating information down the spatial hierarchy are discussed and validated in simulation. We show that a two-layer multi-scale POMDP decreases computation time by an order of magnitude allowing for real-time applications while maintaining high solution quality. For large problems that require three layers to reach the desired resolution, computation time speedups by two orders of magnitude are achieved. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000515767Publication status
publishedExternal links
Book title
2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Pages / Article No.
Publisher
IEEEEvent
Organisational unit
03737 - Siegwart, Roland Y. / Siegwart, Roland Y.
Notes
Conference lecture held on June 1, 2021More
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