HyP-DESPOT: A Hybrid Parallel Algorithm for Online Planning under
  Uncertainty
  Planning under uncertainty is critical for robust robot performance in
uncertain, dynamic environments, but it incurs high computational cost.
State-of-the-art online search algorithms, such as DESPOT, have vastly improved
the computational efficiency of planning under uncertainty and made it a
valuable tool for robotics in practice. This work takes one step further by
leveraging both CPU and GPU parallelization in order to achieve near real-time
online planning performance for complex tasks with large state, action, and
observation spaces. Specifically, we propose Hybrid Parallel DESPOT
(HyP-DESPOT), a massively parallel online planning algorithm that integrates
CPU and GPU parallelism in a multi-level scheme. It performs parallel DESPOT
tree search by simultaneously traversing multiple independent paths using
multi-core CPUs and performs parallel Monte-Carlo simulations at the leaf nodes
of the search tree using GPUs. Experimental results show that HyP-DESPOT speeds
up online planning by up to several hundred times, compared with the original
DESPOT algorithm, in several challenging robotic tasks in simulation.
