Policy-contingent abstraction for robust robot control

ontingent abstraction for robust robot control Joelle Pineau, Geoff Gordon and Sebastian Thrun School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 This paper presents a scalable control algorithm that enables a deployed mobile robot to make high-level control decisions under full consideration of its probabilistic belief. We draw on insights from the rich literature of structured robot controllers and hierarchical MDPs to propose PolCA, a hierarchical probabilistic control algorithm which learns both subtask-specific state abstractions and policies. The resulting controller has been successfully implemented onboard a mobile robotic assistant deployed in a nursing facility. To the best of our knowledge, this work is a unique instance of applying POMDPs to highlevel robotic control problems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: UAI
• Authors: Joelle Pineau, Geoffrey J. Gordon, Sebastian Thrun
• Keywords: Control Algorithm, Deployed Mobile Robot, Robot Control Joelle, UAI 2003, UAI 2008