A Finite-State Controller Based Offline Solver for Deterministic POMDPs

A Finite-State Controller Based Offline Solver for Deterministic POMDPs

Alex Schutz, Yang You, Matías Mattamala, Ipek Caliskanelli, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 8617-8625. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/958

Deterministic partially observable Markov decision processes (DetPOMDPs) often arise in planning problems where the agent is uncertain about its environmental state but can act and observe deterministically. In this paper, we propose DetMCVI, an adaptation of the Monte Carlo Value Iteration (MCVI) algorithm for DetPOMDPs, which builds policies in the form of finite-state controllers (FSCs). DetMCVI solves large problems with a high success rate, outperforming existing baselines for DetPOMDPs. We also verify the performance of the algorithm in a real-world mobile robot forest mapping scenario.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Planning under uncertainty
Planning and Scheduling: PS: POMDPs
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Robot planning
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Planning algorithms