Coupled Sensor Configuration and Path-Planning in Unknown Environments with Adaptive Cluster Analysis

We present an adaptive fast-approximation for sensor configuration which finds near-optimal placements and sensor field of views (FoV). The fast-approximation, either via partition-based or density-based cluster analysis, adapts based on the relation between statistical uncertainty of the path plan and environmental uncertainty. The sensor configurations are performed over regions of interest which most directly influence the path-planning efforts. These regions of interest can include exploratory paths by sampling the probabilistic environment model. The path-planning efforts aim to decide upon a path which minimizes an agent's exposure to threats in an unknown static environment. The noisy sensor network observations are used to construct a threat field estimate using Gaussian Process Regression each iteration with a stationary kernel and heteroscedastic gaussian likelihood. The optimization of a task-driven information gain determines optimal sensor configurations when maximized. The numerical performance of the direct optimization and the adaptive cluster analysis method is presented. Finally, we show that the cluster centers can be utilized as a dimensionality reduction technique for FoV optimization whereby we only optimize FoV radial coverage.