Title: An informative path planning framework for UAV-based terrain monitoring,
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in a wide range of
monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key
challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex
environments. To address this issue, this article introduces a general
informative path planning (IPP) framework for monitoring scenarios using an
aerial robot. The approach is capable of mapping either discrete or continuous
target variables on a terrain using variable-resolution data received from
probabilistic sensors. During a mission, the terrain maps built online are used
to plan information-rich trajectories in continuous 3-D space by optimizing
initial solutions obtained by a course grid search. Extensive simulations show
that our approach is more efficient than existing methods. We also demonstrate
its real-time application on a photorealistic mapping scenario using a publicly
available dataset.