Receding Horizon Cost-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Environmental Monitoring

In this letter, environmental monitoring by mobile robots is considered where expensive or time-consuming sampling has to be carried out in order to obtain a metamodel of the phenomenon investigated. Due to limited resources, often not only a limited number of samples can be taken, but also the cost and time of the traveled distance between the sample points must be considered. We present an adaptive sampling method that greatly reduces the robot’s travel costs for all common sampling criteria with minimal impact on model accuracy. This is achieved by predicting future sample points based on virtual sampling over a horizon in each iteration of the algorithm and suggesting a next sample point after a cost optimization. The algorithm is simulatively evaluated for application to global exploration and reconstruction of unknown phenomena on a variety of randomly generated phenomena. It is shown that our method vastly outperforms standard adaptive sampling.