Graph-based Cross Entropy method for solving multi-robot decentralized POMDPs

This paper introduces a probabilistic algorithm for multi-robot decision-making under uncertainty, which can be posed as a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP). Dec-POMDPs are inherently synchronous decision-making frameworks which require significant computational...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Agha-mohammadi, Ali-akbar, Amato, Christopher, Vian, John, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, Liu, Shih-Yuan, How, Jonathan P
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105797
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0903-0137
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9838-1221
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8576-1930
Description
Summary:This paper introduces a probabilistic algorithm for multi-robot decision-making under uncertainty, which can be posed as a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP). Dec-POMDPs are inherently synchronous decision-making frameworks which require significant computational resources to be solved, making them infeasible for many real-world robotics applications. The Decentralized Partially Observable Semi-Markov Decision Process (Dec-POSMDP) was recently introduced as an extension of the Dec-POMDP that uses high-level macro-actions to allow large-scale, asynchronous decision-making. However, existing Dec-POSMDP solution methods have limited scalability or perform poorly as the problem size grows. This paper proposes a cross-entropy based Dec-POSMDP algorithm motivated by the combinatorial optimization literature. The algorithm is applied to a constrained package delivery domain, where it significantly outperforms existing Dec-POSMDP solution methods.