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Anytime incremental rhoPOMDP planning in continuous spaces
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Ron Benchetrit (M.Sc. Thesis Seminar)
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Monday, 28.04.2025, 11:30
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Advisor: Prof. Vadim Indelman

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a robust framework for decision-making under uncertainty in applications such as autonomous driving and robotic exploration. Their extension, rhoPOMDPs, introduces belief-dependent rewards, enabling explicit reasoning about uncertainty. Existing online rhoPOMDP solvers for continuous spaces rely on fixed belief representations, limiting adaptability and refinement - critical for tasks such as information-gathering. We present rhoPOMCPOW, an anytime solver that dynamically refines belief representations, with formal guarantees of improvement over time. To mitigate the high computational cost of updating belief-dependent rewards, we propose a novel incremental computation approach. We demonstrate its effectiveness for common entropy estimators, reducing computational cost by orders of magnitude. Experimental results show that rhoPOMCPOW outperforms state-of-the-art solvers in both efficiency and solution quality.