Exploring Underwater Environments with Curiosity

This paper presents a novel approach to modeling curiosity in a mobile robot, which is useful for monitoring and adaptive data collection tasks. We use ROST, a real time topic modeling framework to build a semantic perception model of the environment, using which, we plan a path through the locations in the world with high semantic information content. We demonstrate the approach using the Aqua robot in a variety of different scenarios, and find the robot be able to do tasks such as coral reef inspection, diver following, and sea floor exploration, without any prior training or preparation.