Adaptive Informative Path Planning with Multimodal Sensing
  Adaptive Informative Path Planning (AIPP) problems model an agent tasked with
obtaining information subject to resource constraints in unknown, partially
observable environments. Existing work on AIPP has focused on representing
observations about the world as a result of agent movement. We formulate the
more general setting where the agent may choose between different sensors at
the cost of some energy, in addition to traversing the environment to gather
information. We call this problem AIPPMS (MS for Multimodal Sensing). AIPPMS
requires reasoning jointly about the effects of sensing and movement in terms
of both energy expended and information gained. We frame AIPPMS as a Partially
Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and solve it with online planning.
Our approach is based on the Partially Observable Monte Carlo Planning
framework with modifications to ensure constraint feasibility and a heuristic
rollout policy tailored for AIPPMS. We evaluate our method on two domains: a
simulated search-and-rescue scenario and a challenging extension to the classic
RockSample problem. We find that our approach outperforms a classic AIPP
algorithm that is modified for AIPPMS, as well as online planning using a
random rollout policy.
