Anytime Probabilistically Constrained Provably Convergent Online Belief Space Planning
This work addresses safety-critical planning for autonomous robots, offering an incremental improvement over existing probabilistic constraint methods.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring safe online action selection for autonomous robots under probabilistic belief-dependent constraints, presenting an anytime Monte Carlo Tree Search approach that guarantees safety during search and converges exponentially fast in probability, achieving significantly safer and better objective actions than baseline with few tree queries.
Taking into account future risk is essential for an autonomously operating robot to find online not only the best but also a safe action to execute. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced formulation of probabilistic belief-dependent constraints. We present an anytime approach employing the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method in continuous domains. Unlike previous approaches, our method assures safety anytime with respect to the currently expanded search tree without relying on the convergence of the search. We prove convergence in probability with an exponential rate of a version of our algorithms and study proposed techniques via extensive simulations. Even with a tiny number of tree queries, the best action found by our approach is much safer than the baseline. Moreover, our approach constantly finds better than the baseline action in terms of objective. This is because we revise the values and statistics maintained in the search tree and remove from them the contribution of the pruned actions.