Fast discovery of influential outcomes for risk-aware MPDM

In the Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) framework, a robot's policy is elected by sampling from the distribution of current states, predicting future outcomes through forward simulation, and selecting the policy with the best expected performance. Electing the best plan depends on sampling initial conditions with influential (very high costs) outcomes. Discovering these configurations through random sampling may require drawing many samples, which becomes a performance bottleneck. In this paper, we describe a risk-aware approach which augments this sampling with an optimization process that helps discover those influential outcomes. We describe how we overcome several practical difficulties with this approach, and demonstrate significant performance improvements on a real robot platform navigating a semi-crowded, highly dynamic environment.