Interleaved POMDP Planning for Multi-Object Search in Unknown Multi-Room Household Environments

Abstract

Multi-object search in unknown household environments requires planning under extensive uncertainty - from unknown object locations to cluttered spaces with unobserved obstacles. POMDPs offer a principled framework for such problems but remain intractable in large domains. We propose Inter-POMDP, a novel interleaved POMDP planning algorithm that decomposes this challenge into two interacting levels: a high-level POUCT planner reasons over object distributions using LLM-informed histogram beliefs, while a low-level motion planner models navigation uncertainty with obstacle-aware particle beliefs as domain knowledge to guide high-level POUCT. This interleaved design balances planning quality and efficiency despite the large search space across unknown multi-room environments. Both simulation and real-world experiments show that our Inter-POMDP algorithm reduces collision counts by up to 63%, navigation steps by up to 35%, and detection counts by up to 32% compared with baseline methods. Full videos are https://sites.google.com/view/inter-pomdp