## 11.5.3 Examples with Nature Sensing Actions

This section illustrates the effect of nature sensing actions, but only for the nondeterministic case. General methods for computing probabilistic I-states are covered in Section 11.6.

Example 11..22 (Above or Below Disc?)   This example involves continuous time. Suppose that the task is to gather information and determine whether the state trajectory travels above or below some designated region of the state space, as shown in Figure 11.23.

Let . Motions are generated by integrating the velocity , which is expressed as and . For simplicity, assume is applied for all time, which is a command to move right. The nature action interferes with the outcome. The robot tries to make progress by moving in the positive direction; however, the interference of nature makes it difficult to predict the direction. Without nature, there should be no change in the coordinate; however, with nature, the error in the direction could be as much as , after seconds have passed. Figure 11.24 illustrates the possible resulting motions.

Sensor observations will be made that alleviate the growing cone of uncertainty; use the sensing model from Figure 11.11, and suppose that the measurement error is . Suppose there is a disc in of radius larger than , as shown in Figure 11.23a. Since the true state is never further than from the measured state, it is always possible to determine whether the state passed above or below the disc. Multiple possible observation histories are shown in Figure 11.23a. The observation history need not even be continuous, but it is drawn that way for convenience. For a disc with radius less than , there may exist some observation histories for which it is impossible to determine whether the true state traveled above or below the disc; see Figure 11.23b. For other observation histories, it may still be possible to make the determination; for example, from the uppermost trajectory shown in Figure 11.23b it is known for certain that the true state traveled above the disc.

Example 11..23 (A Simple Mobile Robot Model)   In this example, suppose that a robot is modeled as a point that moves in . The sensing model is the same as in Example 11.22, except that discrete stages are used instead of continuous time. It can be imagined that each stage represents a constant interval of time (e.g., second).

To control the robot, a motion command is given in the form of an action . Nature interferes with the motions in two ways: 1) The robot tries to travel some distance , but there is some error , for which the true distance traveled, , is known satisfy ; and 2) the robot tries to move in a direction , but there is some error, , for which the true direction is known to satisfy . These two independent errors can be modeled by defining a 2D nature action set, . The transition equation is then defined so that the forward projection is as shown in Figure 11.25.

Some nondeterministic I-states will now be constructed. Suppose that the initial state is known, and history I-states take the form

 (11.73)

The first sensor observation, , is useless because the initial state is known. Equation (11.29) is applied to yield . Suppose that the action is applied, indicating that the robot should move horizontally to the right. Equation (11.30) is applied to yield , which looks identical to the shown in Figure 11.25. Suppose that an observation is received as shown in Figure 11.26a. Using this, is computed by taking the intersection of and , as shown in Figure 11.26b.

The next step is considerably more complicated. Suppose that and that (11.30) is applied to compute from . The shape shown in Figure 11.26c is obtained by taking the union of for all possible . The resulting shape is composed of circular arcs and straight line segments (see Exercise 13). Once is obtained, an intersection is taken once again to yield , as shown in Figure 11.27. The process repeats in the same way for the desired number of stages. The complexity of the region in Figure 11.26c provides motivation for the approximation methods of Section 11.4.3. For example, the nondeterministic I-states could be nicely approximated by ellipsoidal regions.

Steven M LaValle 2012-04-20