A Novel Monte-Carlo Compressed Sensing and Dictionary Learning Method for the Efficient Path Planning of Remote Sensing Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Monte Carlo-based compressed sensing and dictionary learning approach to optimize path planning for remote sensing robots, significantly reducing travel distance and improving environmental data reconstruction accuracy.

Contribution

It presents the first method exploiting CS measurement matrix structure for optimized robotic path planning using Monte Carlo optimization and data-driven dictionary learning.

Findings

Reduces robot travel distance to less than 10% of full coverage

Improves pollution map reconstruction accuracy over traditional methods

Outperforms existing path planning algorithms in efficiency and accuracy

Abstract

In recent years, Compressed Sensing (CS) has gained significant interest as a technique for acquiring high-resolution sensory data using fewer measurements than traditional Nyquist sampling requires. At the same time, autonomous robotic platforms such as drones and rovers have become increasingly popular tools for remote sensing and environmental monitoring tasks, including measurements of temperature, humidity, and air quality. Within this context, this paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first investigation into how the structure of CS measurement matrices can be exploited to design optimized sampling trajectories for robotic environmental data collection. We propose a novel Monte Carlo optimization framework that generates measurement matrices designed to minimize both the robot's traversal path length and the signal reconstruction error within the CS framework. Central to our approach is the application of Dictionary Learning (DL) to obtain a data-driven sparsifying transform, which enhances reconstruction accuracy while further reducing the number of samples that the robot needs to collect. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments reconstructing $NO_2$ pollution maps over the Gulf region. The results indicate that our approach can reduce robot travel distance to less than $10\%$ of a full-coverage path, while improving reconstruction accuracy by over a factor of five compared to traditional CS methods based on DCT and polynomial dictionaries, as well as by a factor of two compared to previously-proposed Informative Path Planning (IPP) methods.