GRASP News Volume 9, Number 1

A report of the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory

\u3cem\u3eGRASP News\u3c/em\u3e: Volume 9, Number 1

The past year at the GRASP Lab has been an exciting and productive period. As always, innovation and technical advancement arising from past research has lead to unexpected questions and fertile areas for new research. New robots, new mobile platforms, new sensors and cameras, and new personnel have all contributed to the breathtaking pace of the change. Perhaps the most significant change is the trend towards multi-disciplinary projects, most notable the multi-agent project (see inside for details on this, and all the other new and on-going projects). This issue of GRASP News covers the developments for the year 1992 and the first quarter of 1993

A Scalable Method for Solving High-Dimensional Continuous POMDPs Using Local Approximation

Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are typically solved by finding an approximate global solution to a corresponding belief-MDP. In this paper, we offer a new planning algorithm for POMDPs with continuous state, action and observation spaces. Since such domains have an inherent notion of locality, we can find an approximate solution using local optimization methods. We parameterize the belief distribution as a Gaussian mixture, and use the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to approximate the belief update. Since the EKF is a first-order filter, we can marginalize over the observations analytically. By using feedback control and state estimation during policy execution, we recover a behavior that is effectively conditioned on incoming observations despite the unconditioned planning. Local optimization provides no guarantees of global optimality, but it allows us to tackle domains that are at least an order of magnitude larger than the current state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm by considering a simulated hand-eye coordination domain with 16 continuous state dimensions and 6 continuous action dimensions