Discrete Optimal View Path Planning

This paper presents a discrete model of a sensor path planning problem, with a long-term planning horizon. The goal is to minimize the covariance of the reconstructed structures while meeting constraints on the length of the traversed path of the sensor. The sensor is restricted to move on a graph representing a discrete set of configurations, and additional constraints can be incorporated by altering the graph connectivity. This combinatorial problem is formulated as an integer semi-definite program, the relaxation of which provides both a lower bound on the objective cost and input to a proposed genetic algorithm for solving the original problem. An evaluation on synthetic data indicates good performance.