Adaptive Outcome Selection for Planning with Reduced Models

Abstract

Reduced models allow autonomous robots to cope with the complexity of planning in stochastic environments by simplifying the model and reducing its accuracy. The solution quality of a reduced model depends on its fidelity. We present 0/1 reduced model that selectively improves model fidelity in certain states by switching between using a simplified deterministic model and the full model, without significantly compromising the run time gains. We measure the reduction impact for a reduced model based on the values of the ignored outcomes and use this as a heuristic for outcome selection. Finally, we present empirical results of our approach on three different domains, including an electric vehicle charging problem using real-world data from a university campus.