Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Author ORCID Identifier
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Computer Science
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Roderic Grupen
Second Advisor
Shlomo Zilberstein
Third Advisor
Joydeep Biswas
Fourth Advisor
Frank C. Sup IV
Subject Categories
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Abstract
Autonomy in robot systems is a valuable attribute that remains an elusive goal. Noisy sensors, stochastic actions, and variation in unstructured environments all lead to unavoidable errors that can be inconsequential or catastrophic depending on the circumstances. Developing techniques capable of mitigating uncertainty at runtime has, therefore, been a significant and challenging focus of the robotics community.
The primary contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of a new hierarchical belief space planning architecture to manage uncertainty and solve tasks using a uniform framework. Such an approach provides a means of creating autonomous systems that focus on salient subsets of state information, mitigate risk, and require less frequent intervention. Results indicate that it is possible to implement near optimal solutions to interesting problems in a uniform, hierarchical framework of belief space planners by taking actions that condense belief towards goal distributions. Example hierarchies are presented to address simple assembly problems and to enable robust long-term autonomous mobile manipulation in deployments lasting on the order of hours during which the robot executes hundreds of actions.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/13739497
Recommended Citation
Lanighan, Michael W., "Hierarchical Belief Spaces for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1547.
https://doi.org/10.7275/13739497
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1547