An algorithm to create model file for Partially Observable Markov Decision Process for Mobile Robot Path Planning

Abstract

The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), a mathematical framework for decision-making in uncertain environments suffers from the curse of dimensionality. There are various methods that can handle huge sizes of POMDP matrices to create approximate solutions, but no serious effort has been reported to effectively control the size of the POMDP matrices. Manually creating the high-dimension matrices of a POMDP model is a cumbersome and sometimes even impossible task. The PCMRPP (POMDP file Creator for Mobile Robot Path Planning) software package implements a novel algorithm to programmatically generate these matrices such that:• The sizes of the matrices can be controlled by configuring the granularity of discretization of the components of the state and• The sparseness of the matrices can be controlled by configuring the spread of the observation probability distribution.This kind of flexibility allows one to achieve a trade-off between time complexity and the level of robustness of the POMDP solution.