Orienteering-based Path Selection for Mobile Sensors

The goal of information gathering is to obtain data from the environment generating an accurate model for the application of interest. In many applications the information gathering process requires to obtain measurement of the phenomena of interest in harsh or dangerous conditions (e.g., environmental monitoring applications of water in a lake or search and rescue operations in disaster response). Moreover, in recent years, the interest towards robotic sensors such as Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) for information gathering application is steadily increasing. For example, in the context of environmental monitoring a successful monitoring operation must acquire large datasets to build an accurate model of the environmental phenomena of interest. For an exhaustive overview on advancements and applications of mobile sensors for environmental monitoring see [3]. Moreover, in the context of aerial monitoring, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which can fly autonomously at low altitude, are an emerging technology being adapted for a wide range of applications such as remote sensing, scientific research, and search and rescue tasks [9, 10, 15]. In general, when using mobile robotic systems, different path selection strategies could be identified [12]. Offline strategies rely on a predefined path for the agent that is independent from the data that the sensors read. Conversely, using online strategies, the path selection procedure is dependent on the data that has been previously collected from the sensor. In this work we show two different applications for online path selection procedures that rely on a common orienteering formulation. Specifically the contribution is to highlight the formulation of the orienteering problem in the context of information gathering through the use of mobile sensors.