Multi-Object Search using Object-Oriented POMDPs

A core capability of robots is to reason about multiple objects under uncertainty. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a means of reasoning under uncertainty for sequential decision making, but are computationally intractable in large domains. In this paper, we propose Object-Oriented POMDPs (OO-POMDPs), which represent the state and observation spaces in terms of classes and objects. The structure afforded by OO-POMDPs support a factorization of the agent's belief into independent object distributions, which enables the size of the belief to scale linearly versus exponentially in the number of objects. We formulate a novel Multi-Object Search (MOS) task as an OO-POMDP for mobile robotics domains in which the agent must find the locations of multiple objects. Our solution exploits the structure of OO-POMDPs by featuring human language to selectively update the belief at task onset. Using this structure, we develop a new algorithm for efficiently solving OO-POMDPs: Object-Oriented Partially Observable Monte-Carlo Planning (OO-POMCP). We show that OO-POMCP with grounded language commands is sufficient for solving challenging MOS tasks both in simulation and on a physical mobile robot.