Monitoring Water Resources through a Bayesian Optimization-based Approach using Multiple Surface Vehicles: The Ypacarai Lake Case Study

Bayesian optimization is a popular sequential decision strategy that can be used for environmental monitoring. In this work, we propose an efficient multi-Autonomous Surface Vehicle system capable of monitoring the Ypacarai Lake (San Bernardino, Paraguay) (60 km²) using the Bayesian optimization approach with a Voronoi Partition system. The system manages to quickly approximate the real unknown distribution map of a water quality parameter using Gaussian Processes as surrogate models. Furthermore, to select new water quality measurement locations, an acquisition function adapted to vehicle energy constraints is used. Moreover, a Voronoi Partition system helps to distributing the workload with all the available vehicles, so that robustness and scalability is assured. For evaluation purposes, we use both the mean squared error and computational efficiency. The results showed that our method manages to efficiently monitor the Ypacarai Lake, and also provides confident approximate models of water quality parameters. It has been observed that, for every vehicle, the resulting surrogate model improves by 38%.