Observation planning for environment information summarization with deadlines

Mapping is an activity of making a useful description of an environment. Not only geometric information such as free space shape but also semantic information such as object names are sometimes important. We call such a map making environment information summarization because how to summarize may change depending on the purpose of the map and the context. One important aspect of such summarization is the deadline, which imposes a time constraint on the robot's mapping activity. We therefore develop an observation planning method for the summarization with deadlines. The method can cope with various types of deadlines specified in the form of loss function. Experimental results shows various robot behaviors are generated by only changing the deadline specification.