PODDP: Partially Observable Differential Dynamic Programming for Latent Belief Space Planning

Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and nonlinear dynamics suitable for robotics applications are challenging to solve. In this paper, we present an efficient differential dynamic programming (DDP) algorithm for belief space planning in POMDPs with uncertainty over a discrete latent state, and continuous states, actions, observations, and nonlinear dynamics. This representation allows planning of dynamic trajectories which are sensitive to structured uncertainty over discrete latent world states. We develop dynamic programming techniques to optimize a contingency plan over a tree of possible observations and belief space trajectories, and also derive a hierarchical version of the algorithm. Our method is applicable to problems with uncertainty over the cost or reward function (e.g., the configuration of goals or obstacles), uncertainty over the dynamics (e.g., the dynamical mode of a hybrid system), and uncertainty about interactions, where other agents' behavior is conditioned on latent intentions. Benchmarks show that our algorithm outperforms popular heuristic approaches to planning under uncertainty, and results from an autonomous lane changing task demonstrate that our algorithm can synthesize robust interactive trajectories.

SPASS: Scientific Prominence Active Search System with Deep Image Captioning Network

Planetary exploration missions with Mars rovers are complicated, which generally require elaborated task planning by human experts, from the path to take to the images to capture. NASA has been using this process to acquire over 22 million images from the planet Mars. In order to improve the degree of automation and thus efficiency in this process, we propose a system for planetary rovers to actively search for prominence of prespecified scientific features in captured images. Scientists can prespecify such search tasks in natural language and upload them to a rover, on which the deployed system constantly captions captured images with a deep image captioning network and compare the auto-generated captions to the prespecified search tasks by certain metrics so as to prioritize those images for transmission. As a beneficial side effect, the proposed system can also be deployed to ground-based planetary data systems as a content-based search engine.

Adaptive Performance Assessment For Drivers Through Behavioral Advantage

The potential positive impact of autonomous driving and driver assistance technolo- gies have been a major impetus over the last decade. On the flip side, it has been a challenging problem to analyze the performance of human drivers or autonomous driving agents quantitatively. In this work, we propose a generic method that compares the performance of drivers or autonomous driving agents even if the environmental conditions are different, by using the driver behavioral advantage instead of absolute metrics, which efficiently removes the environmental factors. A concrete application of the method is also presented, where the performance of more than 100 truck drivers was evaluated and ranked in terms of fuel efficiency, covering more than 90,000 trips spanning an average of 300 miles in a variety of driving conditions and environments.

Naive Bayes Entrapment Detection for Planetary Rovers

Entrapment detection is a prerequisite for planetary rovers to perform autonomous rescue procedure. In this study, rover entrapment and approximated entrapment criteria are formally defined. Entrapment detection using Naive Bayes classifiers is proposed and discussed along with results from experiments where the Naive Bayes entrapment detector is applied to AutoKralwer rovers. And final conclusions and further discussions are presented in the final section.