A point-based POMDP algorithm for robot planning

Abstract

We present an approximate POMDP solution method for robot planning in partially observable environments. Our algorithm belongs to the family of point-based value iteration solution techniques for POMDP, in which planning is performed only on a sampled set of reachable belief points. We describe a simple, randomized procedure that performs value update steps that strictly improve the value of all belief points in each step. We demonstrate our algorithm on a robotic delivery task in an office environment and on several benchmark problems, for which we compute solutions that are very competitive to those of state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and solution quality.