Topological Hotspot Identification for Informative Path Planning with a Marine Robot

In this work, we present a novel method for constructing a topological map of biological hotspots in an aquatic environment using a Fast Marching-based Voronoi segmentation. Using this topological map, we develop a closed form solution to the scheduling problem for any single path through the graph. Searching over the space of all paths allows us to compute a maximally informative path that traverses a subset of the hotspots, given some budget. Using a greedy-coverage algorithm we can then compute an informative path. We evaluate our method in a set of simulated trials, both with randomly generated environments and a real-world environment. In these trials, we show that our method produces a topological graph which more accurately captures features in the environment than standard thresholding techniques. Additionally, We show that our method can improve the performance of a greedy-coverage algorithm in the informative path planning problem by guiding it to different informative areas to help it escape from local maxima.