Adaptive Sampling and Online Learning in Multi-Robot Sensor Coverage with Mixture of Gaussian Processes

We consider the problem of online environmental sampling and modeling for multi-robot sensor coverage, where a team of robots spread out over the workspace in order to optimize the overall sensing performance. In contrast to most existing works on multi-robot coverage control that assume prior knowledge of the distribution of environmental phenomenon, also known as density function, we relax this assumption and enable the robot team to efficiently learn the model of the unknown density function Online using adaptive sampling and non-parametric inference such as Gaussian Process (GP). To capture significantly different components of the environmental phenomenon, we propose a new approach with mixture of locally learned Gaussian Processes for collective model learning and an information-theoretic criterion for simultaneous adaptive sampling in multi-robot coverage. Our approach demonstrates a better generalization of the environment modeling and thus the improved performance of coverage without assuming the density function is known a priori. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm via simulations of information gathering from indoor static sensors.