Active Signal Emitter Placement In Complex Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel iterative method for optimally placing electromagnetic signal emitters in complex environments, using a belief model and adaptive re-planning to improve signal coverage accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a factor-graph based belief model combined with an adaptive re-planning strategy for emitter placement in complex environments.

Findings

9.8% median error reduction in simulations

Favorable performance in on-robot tests

Improved signal coverage accuracy

Abstract

Placement of electromagnetic signal emitting devices, such as light sources, has important usage in for signal coverage tasks. Automatic placement of these devices is challenging because of the complex interaction of the signal and environment due to reflection, refraction and scattering. In this work, we iteratively improve the placement of these devices by interleaving device placement and sensing actions, correcting errors in the model of the signal propagation. To this end, we propose a novel factor-graph based belief model which combines the measurements taken by the robot and an analytical light propagation model. This model allows accurately modelling the uncertainty of the light propagation with respect to the obstacles, which greatly improves the informative path planning routine. Additionally, we propose a method for determining when to re-plan the emitter placements to balance a trade-off between information about a specific configuration and frequent updating of the configuration. This method incorporates the uncertainty from belief model to adaptively determine when re-configuration is needed. We find that our system has a 9.8% median error reduction compared to a baseline system in simulations in the most difficult environment. We also run on-robot tests and determine that our system performs favorably compared to the baseline.