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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

We introduce the Oracular Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (OPOMDP), a type of POMDP in which the world produces no observations; instead there is an ?racle,?available in any state, that tells the agent its exact state for a fixed cost. The oracle may be a human or a highly accurate sensor. At each timestep the agent must choose whether to take a domain-level action or consult the oracle. This formulation comprises a factorization between information-gathering actions and domain-level actions, allowing us to characterize the value of information and to examine the problem of planning under uncertainty from a novel perspective. We propose an algorithm to capitalize on this factorization and the special structure of the OPOMDP, and we test the algorithm? performance on a new sample domain. On this new domain, we are able to solve a problem with hundreds of thousands of action-states and vastly outperform a previous state-of-the-art approximate technique.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): MultiRobot Lab

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Nicholas Armstrong-Crews and Manuela Veloso, "Oracular Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes: A Very Special Case," Proceedings of ICRA 2007, April, 2007.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Armstrong-Crews_2007_5749,
   author = "Nicholas Armstrong-Crews and Manuela Veloso",
   title = "Oracular Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes: A Very Special Case",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of ICRA 2007",
   month = "April",
   year = "2007",
}

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