Towards a meta motion planner B: algorithm and applications

In a companion paper (see Proceedings of ICRA 2001) we developed a framework for rating or comparing navigation packages. For a given environment a navigation package consists of a motion planner and a sensor to be used during navigation. The ability to rate or measure a navigation package is important in order to address issues like sensor customization for an environment and choice of a motion planner in an environment. In this paper we present the algorithm which we use in order to rate a given navigation package. Under the framework which was presented previously, a partially observable Markov decision process is defined. The algorithm searches for an optimal policy to be employed in this decision process. We briefly review the problem and framework, develop the algorithm and present experimental results.