Although perception is an increasingly dominant portion of the overall computational cost for autonomous systems, only a fraction of the information perceived is likely to be relevant to the current task. To alleviate these perception costs, we develop a novel simultaneous perception–action design framework wherein an agent senses only the task-relevant information. This formulation differs from that of a partially observable Markov decision process, since the agent is free to synthesize not only its policy for action selection but also its belief-dependent observation function. The method enables the agent to balance its perception costs with those incurred by operating in its environment. To obtain a computationally tractable solution, we approximate the value function using a novel method of invariant finite belief sets, wherein the agent acts exclusively on a finite subset of the continuous belief space. We solve the approximate problem through value iteration in which a linear program is solved individually for each belief state in the set, in each iteration. Finally, we prove that the value functions, under an assumption on their structure, converge to their continuous state-space values as the sample density increases.
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Point-based value iteration and approximately optimal dynamic sensor selection for linear-Gaussian processes
The problem of synthesizing an optimal sensor selection policy is pertinent to a wide variety of engineering applications, ranging from event detection to autonomous navigation. In this paper, we consider such a synthesis problem in the context of linear-Gaussian systems. Particularly, we for- mulate the optimal sensor selection problem in terms of a value iteration over the continuous space of covariance matrices. To obtain a computationally tractable solution, we subsequently formulate an approximate sensor selection problem, which is solvable through a point-based value iteration over a finite “mesh” of covariance matrices with a user-defined bounded trace. In addition, we provide theoretical guarantees bounding the suboptimality of the sensor selection policies synthesized through this approximate value iteration. Finally, we analyze the efficacy of our proposed method through a numerical example comparing our method to known results.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1944318
- PAR ID:
- 10488087
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE Control System Letters
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Control Conference
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 6
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Although perception is an increasingly dominant portion of the overall computational cost for autonomous systems, only a fraction of the information perceived is likely to be relevant to the current task. To alleviate these perception costs, we develop a novel simultaneous perception–action design framework wherein an agent senses only the task-relevant information. This formulation differs from that of a partially observable Markov decision process, since the agent is free to synthesize not only its policy for action selection but also its belief-dependent observation function. The method enables the agent to balance its perception costs with those incurred by operating in its environment. To obtain a computationally tractable solution, we approximate the value function using a novel method of invariant finite belief sets, wherein the agent acts exclusively on a finite subset of the continuous belief space. We solve the approximate problem through value iteration in which a linear program is solved individually for each belief state in the set, in each iteration. Finally, we prove that the value functions, under an assumption on their structure, converge to their continuous state-space values as the sample density increases.more » « less
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