Adaptive Surface Cleaning under Uncertain Cleaning Response

Abstract

Surface cleaning requires robots to adapt both where they clean and how they interact with contamination whose response to cleaning may vary spatially and remain unobservable prior to interaction. We formulate adaptive surface cleaning as a partially observable Markov decision process and propose a belief-aware planning framework that uses observed cleaning outcomes to update a latent local cleaning-response model and adapt subsequent cleaning motions, forces, and passes. Preliminary grid-world simulations demonstrate the resulting closed-loop planner adapting its spatial decomposition and cleaning actions as the surface evolves.