Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff in the Adaptive Information Sampling of Unknown Spatial Fields with Mobile Robots

Adaptive information-sampling approaches enable efficient selection of mobile robots' waypoints through which the accurate sensing and mapping of a physical process, such as the radiation or field intensity, can be obtained. A key parameter in the informative sampling objective function could be optimized balance the need to explore new information where the uncertainty is very high and to exploit the data sampled so far, with which a great deal of the underlying spatial fields can be obtained, such as the source locations or modalities of the physical process. However, works in the literature have either assumed the robot's energy is unconstrained or used a homogeneous availability of energy capacity among different robots. Therefore, this paper analyzes the impact of the adaptive information-sampling algorithm's information function used in exploration and exploitation to achieve a tradeoff between balancing the mapping, localization, and energy efficiency objectives. We use Gaussian process regression (GPR) to predict and estimate confidence bounds, thereby determining each point's informativeness. Through extensive experimental data, we provide a deeper and holistic perspective on the effect of information function parameters on the prediction map's accuracy (RMSE), confidence bound (variance), energy consumption (distance), and time spent (sample count) in both single- and multi-robot scenarios. The results provide meaningful insights into choosing the appropriate energy-aware information function parameters based on sensing objectives (e.g., source localization or mapping). Based on our analysis, we can conclude that it would be detrimental to give importance only to the uncertainty of the information function (which would explode the energy needs) or to the predictive mean of the information (which would jeopardize the mapping accuracy). By assigning more importance to the information uncertainly with some non-zero importance to the information value (e.g., 75:25 ratio), it is possible to achieve an optimal tradeoff between exploration and exploitation objectives while keeping the energy requirements manageable.