An Informative Planning Framework for Target Tracking and Active Mapping in Dynamic Environments with ASVs

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated framework for autonomous surface vehicles to actively map and track drifting targets in dynamic environments, combining predictive modeling and informative planning for improved real-world environmental monitoring.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive planning approach with a spatiotemporal prediction network for target tracking, validated through simulations and field tests.

Findings

Enhanced target tracking accuracy over existing entropy-based methods

Effective real-world application demonstrated in environmental monitoring scenarios

Improved adaptive planning for drifting targets in dynamic conditions

Abstract

Mobile robot platforms are increasingly being used to automate information gathering tasks such as environmental monitoring. Efficient target tracking in dynamic environments is critical for applications such as search and rescue and pollutant cleanups. In this letter, we study active mapping of floating targets that drift due to environmental disturbances such as wind and currents. This is a challenging problem as it involves predicting both spatial and temporal variations in the map due to changing conditions. We introduce an integrated framework combining dynamic occupancy grid mapping and an informative planning approach to actively map and track freely drifting targets with an autonomous surface vehicle. A key component of our adaptive planning approach is a spatiotemporal prediction network that predicts target position distributions over time. We further propose a planning objective for target tracking that leverages these predictions. Simulation experiments show that this planning objective improves target tracking performance compared to existing methods that consider only entropy reduction as the planning objective. Finally, we validate our approach in field tests, showcasing its ability to track targets in real-world monitoring scenarios.