We can turn the navigation into an environment as follows: • The percept will be a list of the positions, relative to the agent, of the visible vertices. The percept does not include the position of the robot! The robot must learn its own position from the map; for now, you can assume that each location has a different view." • Each action will be a vector describing a straight-line path to follow. If the path is unobstructed, the action succeeds; otherwise, the robot stops at the point where its path first intersects an obstacle. If the agent returns a zero motion vector and is at the goal (which is fixed and known), then the environment teleports the agent to a random location (not inside an obstacle). • The performance measure charges the agent 1 point for each unit of the distance traversed and awards 1000 points each time the goal is reached. 

a. Implement this environment and a problem-solving agent for it. After each teleportation, the agent will need to formulate a new problem, which will involve discovering its current location.

 b. Document your agent's performance (by having the agent generate suitable commentary as it moves around) and report its performance over 100 episodes. 

c. Modify the environment so that 30% of the time the agent ends up at an unintended destination (chosen randomly from the other visible vertices if any; otherwise, no move at all). This is a crude model of the motion errors of a real robot. Modify the agent so that when such an error is detected, it finds out where it is and then constructs a plan to get back to where it was and resume the old plan. Remember that sometimes getting back to where it was might also fail! Show an example of the agent successfully overcoming two successive motion errors and still reaching the goal. 

d. Now try two different recovery schemes after an error: (1) head for the closest vertex on the original route; and (2) replan a route to the goal from the new location. Compare the performance of the three recovery schemes. Would the inclusion of search costs affect the comparison? 

e. Now suppose that there are locations from which the view is identical. (For example, suppose the world is a grid with square obstacles.) What kind of problem does the agent now face? What do solutions look like?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

a The agent will need to keep track of its position in order to formulate a new problem after each teleportation The agent can keep track of its posit... View the full answer