This demo paper serves to describe a research platform for autonomous surveillance by mobile robots. System components from various technical disciplines (including robot navigation, computer vision, discrete event systems, and human-computer interaction) have been combined together into a cohesive, modular system architecture. We employ our architecture to experiment with state-of-the-art methods in planning and decision making under uncertainty, which we demonstrate enable robots to effectively patrol and respond to surveillance events in a large indoor environment.@en

Linear value function approximation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) has been studied extensively, but there are several challenges when applying such techniques to partially observable MDPs (POMDPs). Furthermore, the system designer often has to choose a set of basis functions. We propose an automatic method to derive a suitable set of basis functions by exploiting the structure of factored models. We experimentally show that our approximation can reduce the solution size by several orders of magnitude in large problems.@en

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a principled framework for modeling an agent’s decision-making problem when the agent needs to consider noisy state estimates. POMDP policies take into account an action’s influence on the environment as well as the potential information gain. This is a crucial feature for robotic agents which generally have to consider the effect of actions on sensing. However, building POMDP models which reward information gain directly is not straightforward, but is important in domains such as robot-assisted surveillance in which the value of information is hard to quantify. Common techniques for uncertainty reduction such as expected entropy minimization lead to non-standard POMDPs that are hard to solve. We present the POMDP with Information Rewards (POMDP-IR) modeling framework, which rewards an agent for reaching a certain level of belief regarding a state feature. By remaining in the standard POMDP setting we can exploit many known results as well as successful approximate algorithms. We demonstrate our ideas in a toy problem as well as in real robot-assisted surveillance, showcasing their use for active cooperative perception scenarios. Finally, our experiments show that the POMDP-IR framework compares favorably with a related approach on benchmark domains.@en

We consider the problem of communication planning for human-machine cooperation in stochastic and partially observable environments. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes with Information Rewards (POMDPs-IR) form a powerful framework for information-gathering tasks in such environments. We propose an extension of the POMDP-IR model, called a Communicating POMDP-IR (com-POMDP-IR), that allows an agent to proactively plan its communication actions by using an approximation of the human’s beliefs. We experimentally demonstrate the capability of our com-POMDPIR agent to limit its communication to relevant information and its robustness to lost messages.@en