The Robotics Institute
Search the site
RI | Publications | Oracular Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes: A Very Special Case

Text only version of this site

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

Jump to: Download | Abstract | Notes | Text Reference | BibTeX Reference

Download [Help]

Adobe portable document format (pdf) [178 KB]

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

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 “oracle,” 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’s 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/group: MultiRobot Lab

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

N. Armstrong-Crews and M. 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"
}


The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
For updates and comments, please see these instructions.
This page maintained by robotwebmaster@ri.cmu.edu