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Fully differentiable sensor placement and informative path planning

delete2025-11-19
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PRE
AI
K
Kalvik Jakkala
S
Srinivas Akella
DOI:10.1177/02783649251384993delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Sensor placement (SP) and informative path planning (IPP) problems are prevalent in environmental monitoring. These problems require gathering the most informative data from a limited number of sensing locations, but existing solutions face a difficult trade-off. Existing methods are often either computationally efficient but less informative, or more informative but too computationally expensive for practical use, especially on resource-constrained robots. Furthermore, many approaches are limited by requiring discretization of the environment or relying on slow, derivative-free optimization techniques. This paper introduces a novel, computationally efficient variational formulation for the SP problem. Our approach is differentiable with respect to the sensing locations, enabling fast gradient-based optimization in continuous spaces and delivering performance comparable to MI-based methods at a fraction of the computational cost. We establish our formulation as a special case of sparse Gaussian processes (SGPs). This connection allows us to generalize the method to solve the IPP problem for single and multi-robot systems, efficiently incorporating differentiable path constraints and diverse sensor types. The approach is validated through extensive benchmarks and field experiments with an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We also provide SGP-Tools—an open-source Python library—and a companion ROS 2 package for Ardupilot-based mobile robots.

Journal

T
The International Journal of Robotics Research
IF:
0
Papers:
126
Citations:
0

Organization

T
Texas A&M University
Scholars:
3.7K
Papers: 1.8K
Citations: 5.1W
U
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Scholars:
178
Papers: 107
Citations: 5.8K