TY - CHAP
T1 - Inference-Enabled Information-Theoretic Exploration of Continuous Action Spaces
AU - Bai, Shi
AU - Wang, Jinkun
AU - Doherty, Kevin
AU - Englot, Brendan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - We consider an autonomous exploration problem in which a mobile robot is guided through an a priori unknown environment by a controller that chooses the most informative action within a local region. We propose a novel approach to efficiently evaluate information gain over the continuous action space that leverages supervised learning, with the anticipated mutual information achieved by a discrete set of action primitives serving as training data. We describe an autonomous exploration algorithm that uses this approach to cover a priori unknown environments. Computational results demonstrate that the method offers an improved rate of entropy reduction, surpassing a baseline approach that selects from the discrete action set, which in some instances requires more computational effort and yields less information.
AB - We consider an autonomous exploration problem in which a mobile robot is guided through an a priori unknown environment by a controller that chooses the most informative action within a local region. We propose a novel approach to efficiently evaluate information gain over the continuous action space that leverages supervised learning, with the anticipated mutual information achieved by a discrete set of action primitives serving as training data. We describe an autonomous exploration algorithm that uses this approach to cover a priori unknown environments. Computational results demonstrate that the method offers an improved rate of entropy reduction, surpassing a baseline approach that selects from the discrete action set, which in some instances requires more computational effort and yields less information.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107077551&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-60916-4_24
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-60916-4_24
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85107077551
T3 - Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics
SP - 419
EP - 433
BT - Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics
ER -