R. Luna, M. Lahijanian, M. Moll, and L. E. Kavraki, “Fast Stochastic Motion Planning with Optimality Guarantees using Local Policy Reconfiguration,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Hong Kong, China, 2014, pp. 3013–3019.
This work presents a framework for fast reconfiguration of local control policies for a stochastic system to satisfy a high-level task specification. The motion of the system is abstracted to a class of uncertain Markov models known as bounded-parameter Markov decision processes (BMDPs). During the abstraction, an efficient sampling-based method for stochastic optimal control is used to construct several policies within a discrete region of the state space in order for the system to transit between neighboring regions. A BMDP is then used to find an optimal strategy over the local policies by maximizing a continuous reward function; a new policy can be computed quickly if the reward function changes. The efficacy of the framework is demonstrated using a sequence of online tasks, showing that highly desirable policies can be obtained by reconfiguring existing local policies in just a few seconds.
Publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907293
PDF preprint: http://kavrakilab.org/publications/luna-lahijanian2014fast-stochastic-motion.pdf