arXiv subjects

Jared J. Beard

Publications and source records attributed to Jared J. Beard.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Feeling Optimistic? Ambiguity Attitudes for Online Decision Making

Due to the complexity of many decision making problems, tree search algorithms often have inadequate information to produce accurate transition models. This results in ambiguities (uncertainties for which there are multiple plausible models). Faced with ambiguities, robust methods have been used to produce safe solutions--often by maximizing the lower bound over the set of plausible transition models. However, they often overlook how much the representation of uncertainty can impact how a decision is made. This work introduces the Ambiguity Attitude Graph Search (AAGS), advocating for more comprehensive representations of ambiguities in decision making. Additionally, AAGS allows users to adjust their ambiguity attitude (or preference), promoting exploration and improving users' ability to control how an agent should respond when faced with a set of plausible alternatives. Simulation in a dynamic sailing environment shows how environments with high entropy transition models can lead robust methods to fail. Results further demonstrate how adjusting ambiguity attitudes better fulfills objectives while mitigating this failure mode of robust approaches. Because this approach is a generalization of the robust framework, these results further demonstrate how algorithms focused on ambiguity have applicability beyond safety-critical systems.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Probabilistically Informed Robot Object Search with Multiple Regions

The increasing use of autonomous robot systems in hazardous environments underscores the need for efficient search and rescue operations. Despite significant advancements, existing literature on object search often falls short in overcoming the difficulty of long planning horizons and dealing with sensor limitations, such as noise. This study introduces a novel approach that formulates the search problem as a belief Markov decision processes with options (BMDP-O) to make Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) a viable tool for overcoming these challenges in large scale environments. The proposed formulation incorporates sequences of actions (options) to move between regions of interest, enabling the algorithm to efficiently scale to large environments. This approach also enables the use of customizable fields of view, for use with multiple types of sensors. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this approach in large environments when compared to the problem without options and alternative tools such as receding horizon planners. Given compute time for the proposed formulation is relatively high, a further approximated "lite" formulation is proposed. The lite formulation finds objects in a comparable number of steps with faster computation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Black-Box Safety Validation of Autonomous Systems: A Multi-Fidelity Reinforcement Learning Approach

The increasing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in society has made it crucial to validate their safety. However, the complex scenarios in which they are used may make formal verification impossible. To address this challenge, simulation-based safety validation is employed to test the complex system. Recent approaches using reinforcement learning are prone to excessive exploitation of known failures and a lack of coverage in the space of failures. To address this limitation, a type of Markov decision process called the "knowledge MDP" has been defined. This approach takes into account both the learned model and its metadata, such as sample counts, in estimating the system's knowledge through the "knows what it knows" framework. A novel algorithm that extends bidirectional learning to multiple fidelities of simulators has been developed to solve the safety validation problem. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through a case study in which an adversary is trained to intercept a test model in a grid-world environment. Monte Carlo trials compare the sample efficiency of the proposed algorithm to learning with a single-fidelity simulator and show the importance of incorporating knowledge about learned models into the decision-making process.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

Team Mountaineers Space Robotic Challenge Phase-2 Qualification Round Preparation Report

Team Mountaineers launched efforts on the NASA Space Robotics Challenge Phase-2 (SRC2). The challenge will be held on the lunar terrain with virtual robotic platforms to establish an in-situ resource utilization process. In this report, we provide an overview of a simulation environment, a virtual mobile robot, and a software architecture that was created by Team Mountaineers in order to prepare for the competition's qualification round before the competition environment was released.

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