Skip to main content

Multi-robot Informative and Adaptive Planning for Persistent Environmental Monitoring

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 6))

Abstract

To gain a better understanding of environmental processes we are interested in the problem of deploying multi-robot systems for efficient collection of environmental data. For long-term autonomy, enabling persistent monitoring, it is important to consider the spatio-temporal variations of environmental phenomena. We develop a multi-robot persistent path planning method that reduces uncertainty in the environmental model. Our framework contains two components: the first component computes potential observation points that minimize model prediction uncertainty, and the second component uses this for online planning of multi-robot paths, while also taking into account the efficiency of information collection. We validated our method via simulations, and the results show that it produces multi-robot routing paths that are conflict-free, informative, and adaptive to the environmental dynamics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Binney, J., Krause, A., Sukhatme, G.S.: Informative path planning for an autonomous underwater vehicle. In: International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 4791–4796 (2010). http://robotics.usc.edu/publications/642/

  2. Binney, J., Krause, A., Sukhatme, G.S.: Optimizing waypoints for monitoring spatiotemporal phenomena. Int. J. Robot. Res. (IJRR) 32(8), 873–888 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Cao, N., Low, K.H., Dolan, J.M.: Multi-robot informative path planning for active sensing of environmental phenomena: a tale of two algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, pp. 7–14 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Croes, A.: A method for solving traveling salesman problems. Oper. Res. 5, 791–812 (1958)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. Fomin, F.V., Lilngas, A.: Approximation algorithms for time-dependent orienteering. Inf. Process. Lett. 83(2), 57–62 (2002)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Gendreau, M., Laporte, G., Semet, F.: A tabu search heuristic for the undirected selective travelling salesman problem. Euro. J. Oper. Res. 106(2–3), 539–545 (1998)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Golden, B.L., Levy, L., Vohra, R.: The orienteering problem. Nav. Res. Logist. (NRL) 34(3), 307–318 (1987)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Gunawan, A., Lau, H.C., Vansteenwegen, P.: Orienteering problem: a survey of recent variants, solution approaches and applications. Euro. J. Oper. Res. 255(2), 315–332 (2016)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Hitz, G., Gotovos, A., Garneau, M.É., Pradalier, C., Krause, A., Siegwart, R.Y., et al.: Fully autonomous focused exploration for robotic environmental monitoring. In: 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 2658–2664. IEEE(2014)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Kuhn, H.W.: The Hungarian method for the assignment problem. Nav. Res. Logist. Q. 2, 83–97 (1955)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Laporte, G., Martello, S.: The selective travelling salesman problem. Discret. Appl. Math. 26(2), 193–207 (1990)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Liu, L., Shell, D.A.: Physically routing robots in a multi-robot network: flexibility through a three dimensional matching graph. IJRR 32(12), 1475–1494 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Low, K.H., Dolan, J.M., Khosla, P.: Active markov information-theoretic path planning for robotic environmental sensing. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS-11), pp. 753–760 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ma, K.C., Liu, L., Sukhatme, G.S.: An information-driven and disturbance-aware planning method for long-term ocean monitoring. In: Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Meliou, A., Krause, A., Guestrin, C., Hellerstein, J.M.: Nonmyopic informative path planning in spatio-temporal models. In: Proceedings of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 602–607 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ouyang, R., Low, K.H., Chen, J., Jaillet, P.: Multi-robot active sensing of non-stationary gaussian process-based environmental phenomena. In: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, pp. 573–580 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Rasmussen, C.E., Williams, C.K.I.: Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning). The MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  18. Shchepetkin, A.F., McWilliams, J.C.: The regional oceanic modeling system (ROMS): a split-explicit, free-surface, topography-following-coordinate oceanic model. Ocean. Model. 9(4), 347–404 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Singh, A., Krause, A., Guestrin, C., Kaiser, W., Batalin, M.: Efficient planning of informative paths for multiple robots. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligence, IJCAI’07, pp. 2204–2211 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Turpin, M., Michael, N., Kumar, V.: Capt: Concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories for multiple robots. Int. J. Robot. Res. 33(1), 98–112 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Stephanie Kemna and Hordur Heidarsson for their valuable inputs on this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lantao Liu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ma, KC., Ma, Z., Liu, L., Sukhatme, G.S. (2018). Multi-robot Informative and Adaptive Planning for Persistent Environmental Monitoring. In: Groß, R., et al. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_20

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_20

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73006-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73008-0

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics