Information-theoretic exploration with Bayesian optimization

Shi Bai, Jinkun Wang, Fanfei Chen, Brendan Englot

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

114 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider an autonomous exploration problem in which a mobile robot is guided by an information-based controller through an a priori unknown environment, choosing to collect its next measurement at the location estimated to be most informative within its current field of view. We propose a novel approach to predict mutual information (MI) using Bayesian optimization. Over several iterations, candidate sensing actions are suggested by Bayesian optimization and added to a committee that repeatedly trains a Gaussian process (GP). The GP estimates MI throughout the robot's action space, serving as the basis for an acquisition function used to select the next candidate. The best sensing action in the committee is executed by the robot. This approach is compared over several environments with two batch methods, one which chooses the most informative action from a set of pseudorandom samples whose MI is explicitly evaluated, and one that applies GP regression to this sample set. Our computational results demonstrate that the proposed method provides not only computational efficiency and rapid map entropy reduction, but also robustness in comparison with competing approaches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIROS 2016 - 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Pages1816-1822
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781509037629
DOIs
StatePublished - 28 Nov 2016
Event2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2016 - Daejeon, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 9 Oct 201614 Oct 2016

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Volume2016-November
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2016
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityDaejeon
Period9/10/1614/10/16

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