Decision-Making for Path Planning of Mobile Robots Under Uncertainty: A Review of Belief-Space Planning Simplifications

Abstract

Uncertainty remains a central challenge in robotic navigation, exploration, and coordination. This paper examines how Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) and their decentralized variants (Dec-POMDPs) provide a rigorous foundation for decision-making under partial observability across tasks such as Active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (A-SLAM), adaptive informative path planning, and multi-robot coordination. We review recent advances that integrate deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with POMDP formulations, highlighting improvements in scalability and adaptability as well as unresolved challenges of robustness, interpretability, and sim-to-real transfer. To complement learning-driven methods, we discuss emerging strategies that embed probabilistic reasoning directly into navigation, including belief-space planning, distributionally robust control formulations, and probabilistic graph models such as enhanced probabilistic roadmaps (PRMs) and Canadian Traveler Problem-based roadmaps. These approaches collectively demonstrate that uncertainty can be managed more effectively by coupling structured inference with data-driven adaptation. The survey concludes by outlining future research directions, emphasizing hybrid learning–planning architectures, neuro-symbolic reasoning, and socially aware navigation frameworks as critical steps toward resilient, transparent, and human-centered autonomy.