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A coupled path-planning and sensor configuration method is proposed. The path-planning objective is to minimize exposure to an unknown spatially-varying scalar field, called the threat field, measured by a network of sensors. Gaussian Process regression is used to estimate the threat field from these measurements. Crucially, the sensors are configurable, i.e., parameters such as location and size of field of view can be changed. A main innovation of this work is that sensor configuration is performed by maximizing a so-called task-driven information gain (TDIG) metric, which quantifies uncertainty reduction in the cost of the planned path. For computational efficiency, a surrogate metric called the self-adaptive mutual information (SAMI) is introduced and shown to be submodular. The proposed method is shown to vastly outperform traditionally decoupled information-driven sensor configuration in terms of the number of measurements required to find near-optimal plans.
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Optimal Coupled Sensor Placement and Path Planning in Unknown Time-Varying Environments
We address path planning for a mobile agent to navigate in an unknown environment with minimum exposure to a spatially and temporally varying threat field. The threat field is estimated using pointwise noisy measurements from a mobile sensor network. For this problem, we present a new information gain measure for optimal sensor placement that quantifies reduction in uncertainty in the path cost rather than the environment state. This measure, which we call the context-relevant mutual information (CRMI), couples the sensor placement and path-planning problem. We propose an iterative coupled sensor configuration and path-planning (CSCP) algorithm. At each iteration, this algorithm places sensors to maximize CRMI, updates the threat estimate using new measurements, and recalculates the path with minimum expected exposure to the threat. The iterations converge when the path cost variance, which is an indicator of risk, reduces below a desired threshold. We show that CRMI is submodular, and therefore greedy optimization provides near-optimal sensor placements while maintaining computational efficiency of the CSCP algorithm. Distance-based sensor reconfiguration costs are introduced in a modified CRMI measure, which we also show to be submodular. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the principal advantage of this algorithm is that near-optimal low-variance paths are achieved using far fewer sensor measurements as compared to a standard sensor placement method.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2126818
- PAR ID:
- 10657209
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIAA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics
- ISSN:
- 0731-5090
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2514/1.G009081
