Hybrid Planning for Dynamic Multimodal Stochastic Shortest Paths
  Sequential decision problems in applications such as manipulation in
warehouses, multi-step meal preparation, and routing in autonomous vehicle
networks often involve reasoning about uncertainty, planning over discrete
modes as well as continuous states, and reacting to dynamic updates. To
formalize such problems generally, we introduce a class of Markov Decision
Processes (MDPs) called Dynamic Multimodal Stochastic Shortest Paths (DMSSPs).
Much of the work in these domains solves deterministic variants, which can
yield poor results when the uncertainty has downstream effects. We develop a
Hybrid Stochastic Planning (HSP) algorithm, which uses domain-agnostic
abstractions to efficiently unify heuristic search for planning over discrete
modes, approximate dynamic programming for stochastic planning over continuous
states, and hierarchical interleaved planning and execution. In the domain of
autonomous multimodal routing, HSP obtains significantly higher quality
solutions than a state-of-the-art Upper Confidence Trees algorithm and a
two-level Receding Horizon Control algorithm.
