Observability and policy optimization for mobile robots
Magnus Egerstedt, Dimitrios Hristu‐Varsakelis · 2004
This paper considers the use of abstract descriptions of motion control programs and of the environment, and explores some new problems of system theoretic interest that arise as a result. Wc study the problem of active localization for a mobile robot moving on a sparsely-described uncertain environment and show how that problem can be posed as that of observability of a finite automaton. We present algorithms (based on Hidden Markov Models) that answer the question of i) whether or not a representation of the environment (in the form of a directed graph) is observable, and ii) what is the shortest navigation policy that allows the robot to uniquely identify its location on the graph.