# Visualization

POMDPModelTools contains a basic visualization interface consisting of the render function.

Problem writers should implement a method of this function so that their problem can be visualized in a variety of contexts including jupyter notebooks, web browsers, or saved as images or animations.

POMDPModelTools.renderFunction
render(m::Union{MDP,POMDP}, step::NamedTuple)

Return a renderable representation of the step in problem m.

The renderable representation may be anything that has show(io, mime, x) methods. It could be a plot, svg, Compose.jl context, Cairo context, or image.

Arguments

step is a NamedTuple that contains the states, action, etc. corresponding to one transition in a simulation. It may have the following fields:

• t: the time step index
• s: the state at the beginning of the step
• a: the action
• sp: the state at the end of the step (s')
• r: the reward for the step
• o: the observation
• b: the belief at the
• bp: the belief at the end of the step
• i: info from the model when the state transition was calculated
• ai: info from the policy decision
• ui: info from the belief update

Keyword arguments are reserved for the problem implementer and can be used to control appearance, etc.

Important Notes

• step may not contain all of the elements listed above, so render should check for them and render only what is available
• o typically corresponds to sp, so it is often clearer for POMDPs to render sp rather than s.
source

Sometimes it is important to have control over how the problem is rendered with different mimetypes. One way to handle this is to have render return a custom type, e.g.

struct MyProblemVisualization
mdp::MyProblem
step::NamedTuple
end

POMDPModelTools.render(mdp, step) = MyProblemVisualization(mdp, step)

and then implement custom show methods, e.g.

show(io::IO, mime::MIME"text/html", v::MyProblemVisualization)