Related papers: Optimal policies for Bayesian olfactory search in …
In turbulent flows, tracking the source of a passive scalar cue requires exploiting the limited information that can be gleaned from rare, stochastic encounters with the cue. When crafting a search policy, the most challenging and important…
The problem of tracking the source of a passive scalar in a turbulent flow is relevant to flying insect behavior and several other applications. Extensive previous work has shown that certain Bayesian strategies, such as "infotaxis," can be…
Olfactory search in turbulent environments is a sensorimotor challenge solved with remarkable efficiency by many animals, yet replicating this ability in artificial systems remains difficult because detections are intermittent and wind…
The olfactory search POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process) is a sequential decision-making problem designed to mimic the task faced by insects searching for a source of odor in turbulence, and its solutions have applications…
Locating the source of odor in a turbulent environment - a common behavior for living organisms - is non-trivial because of the random nature of mixing. Here we analyze the statistical physics aspects of the problem and propose an efficient…
We propose a new approach to the problem of searching a space of policies for a Markov decision process (MDP) or a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), given a model. Our approach is based on the following observation: Any…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) form an attractive and principled framework for agent planning under uncertainty. Point-based approximate techniques for POMDPs compute a policy based on a finite set of points…
We consider the problem of olfactory searches in a turbulent environment. We focus on agents that respond solely to odor stimuli, with no access to spatial perception nor prior information about the odor. We ask whether navigation to a…
Search and rescue missions and surveillance require finding targets in a large area. These tasks often use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with cameras to detect and move towards a target. However, common UAV approaches make two simplifying…
The task of olfactory search is ubiquitous in nature and in technology, from animals in the quest of food or of a mating partner, to robots searching for the source of hazardous fumes in a chemical plant. Here, we focus on the algorithmic…
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…
Designing a safe policy for uncertain environments is crucial in real-world control systems. However, this challenge remains inadequately addressed within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework. This paper presents the first algorithm…
Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…
Some female moths attract male moths by emitting series of pulses of pheromone filaments propagating downwind. The turbulent nature of the wind creates a complex flow environment, and causes the filaments to propagate in the form of patches…
Finding an odor source in a turbulent flow requires effectively leveraging the history of olfactory observations into a robust navigation strategy. In this work, we use tabular Q-learning to train an olfactory search agent with a minimal…
The problem of locating an odor source in turbulent flows is central to key applications such as environmental monitoring and disaster response. We address this challenge by designing an algorithm based on Bayesian inference, which uses…
Finding the distant source of an odor dispersed by a turbulent flow is a vital task for many organisms, either for foraging or for mating purposes. At the level of individual search, animals like moths have developed effective strategies to…
Bayesian Optimisation has gained much popularity lately, as a global optimisation technique for functions that are expensive to evaluate or unknown a priori. While classical BO focuses on where to gather an observation next, it does not…
A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…
Active search is a learning paradigm for actively identifying as many members of a given class as possible. A critical target scenario is high-throughput screening for scientific discovery, such as drug or materials discovery. In this…