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[SYP+24] Shili Sheng, Pian Yu, David Parker, Marta Kwiatkowska, Lu Feng. Safe POMDP Online Planning among Dynamic Agents via Adaptive Conformal Prediction. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 11(9), pages 9946-9953. 2024. [pdf] [bib]
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Abstract. Online planning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provides efficient techniques for robot decision-making under uncertainty. However, existing methods fall short of preventing safety violations in dynamic environments. This work presents a novel safe POMDP online planning approach that maximizes expected returns while providing probabilistic safety guarantees amidst environments populated by multiple dynamic agents. Our approach utilizes data-driven trajectory prediction models of dynamic agents and applies Adaptive Conformal Prediction (ACP) to quantify the uncertainties in these predictions. Leveraging the obtained ACP-based trajectory predictions, our approach constructs safety shields on-the-fly to prevent unsafe actions within POMDP online planning. Through experimental evaluation in various dynamic environments using real-world pedestrian trajectory data, the proposed approach has been shown to effectively maintain probabilistic safety guarantees while accommodating up to hundreds of dynamic agents.