Informative Path Planning for Active Field Mapping under Localization Uncertainty

Information gathering algorithms play a key role in unlocking the potential of robots for efficient data collection in a wide range of applications. However, most existing strategies neglect the fundamental problem of the robot pose uncertainty, which is an implicit requirement for creating robust, high-quality maps. To address this issue, we introduce an informative planning framework for active mapping that explicitly accounts for the pose uncertainty in both the mapping and planning tasks. Our strategy exploits a Gaussian Process (GP) model to capture a target environmental field given the uncertainty on its inputs. For planning, we formulate a new utility function that couples the localization and field mapping objectives in GP-based mapping scenarios in a principled way, without relying on any manually tuned parameters. Extensive simulations show that our approach outperforms existing strategies, with reductions in mean pose uncertainty and map error. We also present a proof of concept in an indoor temperature mapping scenario.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, submission (revised) to Robotics & Automation Letters (and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Active Mapping and Robot Exploration: A Survey

Simultaneous localization and mapping responds to the problem of building a map of the environment without any prior information and based on the data obtained from one or more sensors. In most situations, the robot is driven by a human operator, but some systems are capable of navigating autonomously while mapping, which is called native simultaneous localization and mapping. This strategy focuses on actively calculating the trajectories to explore the environment while building a map with a minimum error. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the research work developed in this field is provided, targeting the most relevant contributions in indoor mobile robotics.This research was funded by the ELKARTEK project ELKARBOT KK-2020/00092 of the Basque Government

Life-long spatio-temporal exploration of dynamic environments

We propose a new idea for life-long mobile robot spatio-temporal exploration of dynamic environments. Our method assumes that the world is subject to perpetual change, which adds an extra, temporal dimension to the explored space and makes the exploration task a never-ending data-gathering process. To create and maintain a spatio-temporal model of a dynamic environment, the robot has to determine not only where, but also when to perform observations. We address the problem by application of information-theoretic exploration to world representations that model the uncertainty of environment states as probabilistic functions of time. We compare the performance of different exploration strategies and temporal models on real-world data gathered over the course of several months and show that combination of dynamic environment representations with information-gain exploration principles allows to create and maintain up-to-date models of constantly changing environments