POrTAL: Plan-Orchestrated Tree Assembly for Lookahead

Abstract

When tasking robots in partially observable environments, these robots must efficiently and robustly plan to achieve task goals under uncertainty. Although many probabilistic planning algorithms exist for this purpose, these algorithms can be inefficient if executed with the robot's limited computational resources, or may produce policies that take more steps than expected to achieve the goal. We therefore created a new, lightweight, probabilistic planning algorithm, Plan-Orchestrated Tree Assembly for Lookahead (POrTAL), that combines the strengths of two baseline planning algorithms, FF-Replan and POMCP. We demonstrate that POrTAL is an anytime algorithm that generally outperforms these baselines in terms of the final executed plan length given bounded computation time, especially for problems with only moderate levels of uncertainty.