No Arabic abstract
Task planning in a probabilistic belief state domains allows generating complex and robust execution policies in those domains affected by state uncertainty. The performance of a task planner relies on the belief state representation. However, current belief state representation becomes easily intractable as the number of variables and execution time grows. To address this problem, we developed a novel belief state representation based on cartesian product and union operations over belief substates. These two operations and single variable assignment nodes form And-Or directed acyclic graph of Belief State (AOBS). We show how to apply actions with probabilistic outcomes and measure the probability of conditions holding over belief state. We evaluated AOBS performance in simulated forward state space exploration. We compared the size of AOBS with the size of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD) that were previously used to represent belief state. We show that AOBS representation is not only much more compact than a full belief state but it also scales better than BDD for most of the cases.
There is considerable interest in designing meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms, which enable autonomous agents to adapt new tasks from small amount of experience. In meta-RL, the specification (such as reward function) of current task is hidden from the agent. In addition, states are hidden within each task owing to sensor noise or limitations in realistic environments. Therefore, the meta-RL agent faces the challenge of specifying both the hidden task and states based on small amount of experience. To address this, we propose estimating disentangled belief about task and states, leveraging an inductive bias that the task and states can be regarded as global and local features of each task. Specifically, we train a hierarchical state-space model (HSSM) parameterized by deep neural networks as an environment model, whose global and local latent variables correspond to task and states, respectively. Because the HSSM does not allow analytical computation of posterior distribution, i.e., belief, we employ amortized inference to approximate it. After the belief is obtained, we can augment observations of a model-free policy with the belief to efficiently train the policy. Moreover, because task and state information are factorized and interpretable, the downstream policy training is facilitated compared with the prior methods that did not consider the hierarchical nature. Empirical validations on a GridWorld environment confirm that the HSSM can separate the hidden task and states information. Then, we compare the meta-RL agent with the HSSM to prior meta-RL methods in MuJoCo environments, and confirm that our agent requires less training data and reaches higher final performance.
In this paper, we propose Belief Behavior Trees (BBTs), an extension to Behavior Trees (BTs) that allows to automatically create a policy that controls a robot in partially observable environments. We extend the semantic of BTs to account for the uncertainty that affects both the conditions and action nodes of the BT. The tree gets synthesized following a planning strategy for BTs proposed recently: from a set of goal conditions we iteratively select a goal and find the action, or in general the subtree, that satisfies it. Such action may have preconditions that do not hold. For those preconditions, we find an action or subtree in the same fashion. We extend this approach by including, in the planner, actions that have the purpose to reduce the uncertainty that affects the value of a condition node in the BT (for example, turning on the lights to have better lighting conditions). We demonstrate that BBTs allows task planning with non-deterministic outcomes for actions. We provide experimental validation of our approach in a real robotic scenario and - for sake of reproducibility - in a simulated one.
We present an integrated Task-Motion Planning (TMP) framework for navigation in large-scale environment. Autonomous robots operating in real world complex scenarios require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge intensive domains, on the one hand, a robot has to reason at the highest-level, for example the regions to navigate to; on the other hand, the feasibility of the respective navigation tasks have to be checked at the execution level. This presents a need for motion-planning-aware task planners. We discuss a probabilistically complete approach that leverages this task-motion interaction for navigating in indoor domains, returning a plan that is optimal at the task-level. Furthermore, our framework is intended for motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty, which is formally known as belief space planning. The underlying methodology is validated with a simulated office environment in Gazebo. In addition, we discuss the limitations and provide suggestions for improvements and future work.
We present an integrated Task-Motion Planning (TMP) framework for navigation in large-scale environments. Of late, TMP for manipulation has attracted significant interest resulting in a proliferation of different approaches. In contrast, TMP for navigation has received considerably less attention. Autonomous robots operating in real-world complex scenarios require planning in the discrete (task) space and the continuous (motion) space. In knowledge-intensive domains, on the one hand, a robot has to reason at the highest-level, for example, the objects to procure, the regions to navigate to in order to acquire them; on the other hand, the feasibility of the respective navigation tasks have to be checked at the execution level. This presents a need for motion-planning-aware task planners. In this paper, we discuss a probabilistically complete approach that leverages this task-motion interaction for navigating in large knowledge-intensive domains, returning a plan that is optimal at the task-level. The framework is intended for motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty, which is formally known as belief space planning. The underlying methodology is validated in simulation, in an office environment and its scalability is tested in the larger Willow Garage world. A reasonable comparison with a work that is closest to our approach is also provided. We also demonstrate the adaptability of our approach by considering a building floor navigation domain. Finally, we also discuss the limitations of our approach and put forward suggestions for improvements and future work.
Everyday tasks are characterized by their varieties and variations, and frequently are not clearly specified to service agents. This paper presents a comprehensive approach to enable a service agent to deal with everyday tasks in open, uncontrolled environments. We introduce a generic structure for representing tasks, and another structure for representing situations. Based on the two newly introduced structures, we present a methodology of situation handling that avoids hard-coding domain rules while improving the scalability of real-world task planning systems.