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A factored Nonlinear Program (Factored-NLP) explicitly models the dependencies between a set of continuous variables and nonlinear constraints, providing an expressive formulation for relevant robotics problems such as manipulation planning…
AI can not only outperform people in many planning tasks, but it can also teach them how to plan better. A recent and promising approach to improving human decision-making is to create intelligent tutors that utilize AI to discover and…
Calculating optimal policies is known to be computationally difficult for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces. This paper studies finite-state approximations of discrete time Markov decision processes with…
In this thesis, we aim to improve the performance of TAMP algorithms from three complementary perspectives. First, we investigate the integration of discrete task planning with continuous trajectory optimization. Our main contribution is a…
Planning under uncertainty is critical to robotics. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for such planning problems. It is powerful due to its careful quantification of the non-deterministic…
Resource sharing between multiple workloads has become a prominent practice among cloud service providers, motivated by demand for improved resource utilization and reduced cost of ownership. Effective resource sharing, however, remains an…
This paper is concerned with planning in stochastic domains by means of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). POMDPs are difficult to solve. This paper identifies a subclass of POMDPs called region observable POMDPs,…
In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission. Such problems are inherently mixed discrete-continuous: a high-level action sequence and a physically feasible continuous trajectory. The…
Scheduling is a key decision-making process to improve the performance of flexible manufacturing systems. Place-timed Petri nets provide a formal method for graphically modeling and analyzing such systems. By generating reachability graphs…
This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…
We study time-bounded reachability in continuous-time Markov decision processes for time-abstract scheduler classes. Such reachability problems play a paramount role in dependability analysis and the modelling of manufacturing and queueing…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
Dynamic Programming suffers from the curse of dimensionality due to large state and action spaces, a challenge further compounded by uncertainties in the environment. To mitigate these issue, we explore an off-policy based Temporal…
Autonomous systems often have logical constraints arising, for example, from safety, operational, or regulatory requirements. Such constraints can be expressed using temporal logic specifications. The system state is often partially…
Trajectory planning is challenging for autonomous cars since they operate in unpredictable environments with limited sensor horizons. To incorporate new information as it is sensed, planning is done in a loop, with the next plan being…
A new mechanism for efficiently solving the Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed in this paper. We introduce the notion of reachability landscape where we use the Mean First Passage Time (MFPT) as a means to characterize the…
We consider approximate dynamic programming in $\gamma$-discounted Markov decision processes and apply it to approximate planning with linear value-function approximation. Our first contribution is a new variant of Approximate Policy…
We investigate the problem of monitoring partially observable systems with nondeterministic and probabilistic dynamics. In such systems, every state may be associated with a risk, e.g., the probability of an imminent crash. During runtime,…
This paper addresses the problem of training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy under partial observability by exploiting a privileged, anytime-feasible planner agent available exclusively during training. We formalize this as a Partially…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are widely used in probabilistic planning problems in which an agent interacts with an environment using noisy and imprecise sensors. We study a setting in which the sensors are only…