Related papers: Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by P…

Multi-agent active perception is a task where a team of agents cooperatively gathers observations to compute a joint estimate of a hidden variable. The task is decentralized and the joint estimate can only be computed after the task ends by…

Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…

This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…

We describe a probabilistic framework for synthesizing control policies for general multi-robot systems, given environment and sensor models and a cost function. Decentralized, partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are…

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are rich models for cooperative decision-making under uncertainty, but are often intractable to solve optimally (NEXP-complete). The transition and observation…

Multi-agent planning in stochastic environments can be framed formally as a decentralized Markov decision problem. Many real-life distributed problems that arise in manufacturing, multi-robot coordination and information gathering scenarios…

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (minimize…

Decentralized (PO)MDPs provide an expressive framework for sequential decision making in a multiagent system. Given their computational complexity, recent research has focused on tractable yet practical subclasses of Dec-POMDPs. We address…

Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for multi-agent sequential decision making. While fnite-horizon DECPOMDPs have enjoyed signifcant success, progress remains slow for the infnite-horizon case mainly due to the inherent…

A team of robots sharing a common goal can benefit from coordination of the activities of team members, helping the team to reach the goal more reliably or quickly. We address the problem of coordinating the actions of a team of robots with…

It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…

Multi-agent planning under stochastic dynamics is usually formalised using decentralized (partially observable) Markov decision processes ( MDPs) and reachability or expected reward specifications. In this paper, we propose a different…

Partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a standard model for agents making decisions in uncertain environments. Most work on POMDPs focuses on synthesizing strategies based on the available capabilities. However, system…

Planning for distributed agents with partial state information is considered from a decision- theoretic perspective. We describe generalizations of both the MDP and POMDP models that allow for decentralized control. For even a small number…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable, fully cooperative multi-agent settings (Dec-POMDPs) can in principle be used to address many real-world challenges such as controlling a swarm of rescue robots or a team of quadcopters.…

We consider the problem of finding the best memoryless stochastic policy for an infinite-horizon partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) with finite state and action spaces with respect to either the discounted or mean reward…

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) formalize the problem of designing individual controllers for a group of collaborative agents under stochastic dynamics and partial observability. Seeking a global…

We present a method for a certain class of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can relate the optimal policy back to one or more reward sources in the environment. For a given initial state, without fully computing the value function,…

Optimally solving decentralized decision-making problems modeled as Dec-POMDPs is known to be NEXP-complete. These optimal solutions are policies based on the entire history of observations and actions of an agent. However, some…

This paper addresses a fundamental question of multi-agent knowledge distribution: what information should be sent to whom and when, with the limited resources available to each agent? Communication requirements for multi-agent systems can…