Real-time hierarchical POMDPs for autonomous robot navigation

This paper proposes a new hierarchical formulation of POMDPs for autonomous robot navigation that can be solved in real-time, and is memory efficient. It will be referred to in this paper as the Robot Navigation–Hierarchical POMDP (RN-HPOMDP). The RN-HPOMDP is utilized as a unified framework for autonomous robot navigation in dynamic environments. As such, it is used for localization, planning and local obstacle avoidance. Hence, the RN-HPOMDP decides at each time step the actions the robot should execute, without the intervention of any other external module for obstacle avoidance or localization. Our approach employs state space and action space hierarchy, and can effectively model large environments at a fine resolution. Finally, the notion of the reference POMDP is introduced. The latter holds all the information regarding motion and sensor uncertainty, which makes the proposed hierarchical structure memory efficient and enables fast learning. The RN-HPOMDP has been experimentally validated in real dynamic environments.