Multiscale Abstraction, Planning and Control using Diffusion Wavelets for Stochastic Optimal Control Problems

Abstract: This work presents a multiscale framework to solve a class of stochastic optimal control problems in the context of robot motion planning and control in a complex environment. In order to handle complications resulting from a large decision space and complex environmental geometry, two key concepts are adopted: (a) a diffusion wavelet representation of the Markov chain for hierarchical abstraction of the state space; and (b) a desirability function-based representation of the Markov decision process (MDP) to efficiently calculate the optimal policy. In the proposed framework, a global plan that compressively takes into account the long time/length-scale state transition is first obtained by approximately solving an MDP whose desirability function is represented by coarse scale bases in the hierarchical abstraction. Then, a detailed local plan is computed by solving an MDP that considers wavelet bases associated with a focused region of the state space, guided by the global plan. The resulting multiscale plan is utilized to finally compute a continuous-time optimal control policy within a receding horizon implementation. Two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed approach.