Science-centric sampling approaches of geo-physical environments for realistic robot navigation
Parker, Lonnie Thomas
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The objective of this research effort is to provide a methodology for assessing the effectiveness of sampling techniques used to gather different types of geo-physical information by a robotic agent. We focus on assessing how well unique real-time sampling strategies acquire information that is, otherwise, too dangerous or costly to collect by human scientists. Traditional sampling strategies and informed search tech- niques provide the underlying structure for a navigating robotic surveyor whose goal is to collect samples that yield an accurate representation of the measured phenomena under realistic constraints. These sampling strategies are alternative improvements that provide greater information gain than current sampling technology allows. The contributions of this work include the following: 1) A method for estimating spa- tially distributed phenomena, using a partial sample set of information, that shows improvement over that of a more traditional estimation method. 2) A method for sampling this phenomena in the form of a navigation scheme for a mobile robotic survey system. 3) A method of ranking and comparing different navigation algorithms relative to one another based on performance (reconstruction error) and resource (distance) constraints. We introduce a specific class of navigation algorithms as example sampling strategies to demonstrate how our methodology allows different robot navigation options to be contrasted and the most practical strategy selected.