A Partially Observable Markov-Decision-Process-Based Blackboard Architecture for Cognitive Agents in Partially Observable Environments

摘要

Partial observability, or the inability of an agent to fully observe the state of its environment, exists in many real-world problem domains. However, most cognitive architectures do not have a theoretical foundation that allows for a systematic approach to handling partial observability. To address this issue, in this article, we propose a novel cognitive architecture based on the theory of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We focus on one of the most fundamental cognitive architectures, the blackboard architecture, and reformulate it using the POMDP framework so that the agent can automatically decide how to use its information processing modules in partially observable environments. We propose a two-layer POMDP model for the blackboard architecture in which one layer models the dynamics of the environment and the other layer models the dynamics of the blackboard and knowledge sources within the agent. We also provide a planning method to find the optimal actions for the two-layer POMDP model based on the partially observable upper confidence bounds applied to trees (PO-UCT) algorithm. We validate the proposed architecture in both numerical and real-robot experiments.