Mixed Observable RRT: Multi-Agent Mission-Planning in Partially Observable Environments
This addresses centralized planning for multi-agent systems in mixed observability settings, representing an incremental advancement by integrating existing techniques like RRT and HMM for specific applications.
The paper tackles mission-planning for heterogeneous multi-agent systems to locate a hidden target in partially observable environments, proposing a mixed observable RRT method combined with dynamic programming and model predictive control, and demonstrates in experiments that agents efficiently explore and locate the target collaboratively.
This paper considers centralized mission-planning for a heterogeneous multi-agent system with the aim of locating a hidden target. We propose a mixed observable setting, consisting of a fully observable state-space and a partially observable environment, using a hidden Markov model. First, we construct rapidly exploring random trees (RRTs) to introduce the mixed observable RRT for finding plausible mission plans giving way-points for each agent. Leveraging this construction, we present a path-selection strategy based on a dynamic programming approach, which accounts for the uncertainty from partial observations and minimizes the expected cost. Finally, we combine the high-level plan with model predictive control algorithms to evaluate the approach on an experimental setup consisting of a quadruped robot and a drone. It is shown that agents are able to make intelligent decisions to explore the area efficiently and to locate the target through collaborative actions.