Information Foraging and Change Detection for Automated Science Exploration

This paper presents a new algorithm for autonomous on-line exploration in unknown environments. The objective is to free remote scientists from possibly-infeasible extensive preliminary site investigation prior to sending robotic agents. We simulate a common exploration task for an autonomous robot...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI). Reports
Main Authors Furlong, P Michael, Dille, Michael
Format Report
LanguageEnglish
Published Hampton NASA/Langley Research Center 01.08.2016
Subjects
Change detection
Computer simulation
Exploration
Robots
Sampling
Unknown environments
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Summary:This paper presents a new algorithm for autonomous on-line exploration in unknown environments. The objective is to free remote scientists from possibly-infeasible extensive preliminary site investigation prior to sending robotic agents. We simulate a common exploration task for an autonomous robot sampling the environment at various locations and compare performance against simpler control strategies. An extension is proposed and evaluated that further permits operation in the presence of environmental variability in which the robot encounters a change in the distribution underlying sampling targets. Experimental results indicate a strong improvement in performance across varied parameter choices for the scenario.