ARDESPOT

An implementation of the AR-DESPOT (Anytime Regularized DEterminized Sparse Partially Observable Tree) online POMDP Solver.

Tried to match the pseudocode from this paper: http://bigbird.comp.nus.edu.sg/m2ap/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/jair14.pdf as closely as possible. Look there for definitions of all symbols.

Problems use the POMDPs.jl generative interface.

If you are trying to use this package and require more documentation, please file an issue!

Installation

On Julia v1.0 or later, ARDESPOT is in the Julia General registry

Pkg.add("POMDPs")
Pkg.add("ARDESPOT")

Usage

using POMDPs, POMDPModels, ARDESPOT
using POMDPTools

pomdp = TigerPOMDP()

solver = DESPOTSolver(bounds=(-20.0, 0.0))
planner = solve(solver, pomdp)

for (s, a, o) in stepthrough(pomdp, planner, "s,a,o", max_steps=10)
    println("State was $s,")
    println("action $a was taken,")
    println("and observation $o was received.\n")
end

For minimal examples of problem implementations, see this notebook and the POMDPs.jl generative docs.

Solver Options

Solver options can be found in the DESPOTSolver docstring and accessed using Julia's built in documentation system (or directly in the Solver source code). Each option has its own docstring and can be set with a keyword argument in the DESPOTSolver constructor. The definitions of the parameters match as closely as possible to the corresponding definition in the pseudocode of this paper.

Bounds

Independent bounds

In most cases, the recommended way to specify bounds is with an IndependentBounds object, i.e.

DESPOTSolver(bounds=IndependentBounds(lower, upper))

where lower and upper are either a number or a function (see below).

Often, the lower bound is calculated with a default policy, this can be accomplished using a DefaultPolicyLB with any Solver or Policy.

If lower or upper is a function, it should handle two arguments. The first is the POMDP object and the second is the ScenarioBelief. To access the state particles in a ScenairoBelief b, use particles(b) (or collect(particles(b)) to get a vector).

In most cases, the check_terminal and consistency_fix_thresh keyword arguments of IndependentBounds should be used to add robustness (see the IndependentBounds docstring for more info).

Example

For the BabyPOMDP from POMDPModels, bounds setup might look like this:

using POMDPModels
using POMDPTools
always_feed = FunctionPolicy(b->true)
lower = DefaultPolicyLB(always_feed)

function upper(pomdp::BabyPOMDP, b::ScenarioBelief)
    if all(s==true for s in particles(b)) # all particles are hungry
        return pomdp.r_hungry # the baby is hungry this time, but then becomes full magically and stays that way forever
    else
        return 0.0 # the baby magically stays full forever
    end
end

solver = DESPOTSolver(bounds=IndependentBounds(lower, upper))

Non-Independent bounds

Bounds need not be calculated independently; a single function that takes in the POMDP and ScenarioBelief and returns a tuple containing the lower and upper bounds can be passed to the bounds argument.

Visualization

D3Trees.jl can be used to visualize the search tree, for example

using POMDPs, POMDPModels, D3Trees, ARDESPOT
using POMDPTools

pomdp = TigerPOMDP()

solver = DESPOTSolver(bounds=(-20.0, 0.0), tree_in_info=true)
planner = solve(solver, pomdp)
b0 = initialstate_distribution(pomdp)

a, info = action_info(planner, b0)
inchrome(D3Tree(info[:tree], init_expand=5))

will create an interactive tree that looks like this:

Relationship to DESPOT.jl

DESPOT.jl was designed to exactly emulate the C++ code released by the original DESPOT developers. This implementation was designed to be as close to the pseudocode from the journal paper as possible for the sake of readability. ARDESPOT has a few more features (for example DESPOT.jl does not implement regularization and pruning), and has more compatibility with a wider range of POMDPs.jl problems because it does not emulate the C++ code.