KDI: Sequential Decision Making in Animals and Machines

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9873531HendersonMobile organisms make accurate behavioral decisions with extraordinary speed and flexibility in real-world environments despite incomplete knowledge about the state of the world and the effects of their actions. This ability must be shared by artificial agents such as mobile robots if they are to operate flexibly in similar environments. The main goal of the research is to undertake a detailed interdisciplinary study of sequential decision making across animals and robots, with a focus on real time learning and control of information gathering and navigational behaviors.The project will take a comparative approach, combining psychophysical and cognitive research techniques from the study of human eye movement control, behavioral research techniques from the study of insect navigation, and computational methods from the study of mobile robots. All of these systems provide experimentally tractable test-beds for studying real-time decision making in partially observable environments.The research is guided by a class of sequential decision making models called Markov decision processes (MDP). These models are attractive because they provide a formal framework for computing optimal behavior in uncertain environments. However, these models do not fully capture the complexity of decision making in organisms. We will explore extensions of the MDP framework using insights gained from the study of behavior in organisms and algorithms in artificial agents. This synergy will lead both to a better theoretical understanding of sequential decision making in biological organisms, and to the development of efficient algorithms for artificial agents.A major outcome of the project will be to show how the design of artificial creatures (robots) can be guided by, and serve as a guide for, the study of sequential behavior in animals. Understanding the challenges that robot designers face, and the formal framework that they have developed to tackle these challenges, leads to novel questions about organisms behavior. Similarly, insights gained from organisms will help suggest ways for improving algorithms for building intelligent artificial agents.***