Multi-Step Predictions for Adaptive Sampling in Mobile Robotic Sensor Networks using Proximal ADMM

摘要: This paper presents a novel approach, using multi-step predictions, to the adaptive sampling problem for efficient monitoring of environmental spatial phenomena in a mobile sensor network. We employ a Gaussian process to represent the spatial field of interest, which is then used to predict the field at unmeasured locations. The adaptive sampling problem aims to drive the mobile sensors to optimally navigate the environment while the sensors adaptively take measurements of the spatial phenomena at each sampling step. To this end, an optimal sampling criterion based on conditional entropy is proposed, which minimizes the prediction uncertainty of the Gaussian process model. By predicting the measurements the mobile sensors potentially take in a finite horizon of multiple future sampling steps and exploiting the chain rule of the conditional entropy, a multi-step-ahead adaptive sampling optimization problem …