An informative path planning framework for UAV-based terrain monitoring

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in a wide range of monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex environments. To address this issue, this article introduces a general informative path planning (IPP) framework for monitoring scenarios using an aerial robot. The approach is capable of mapping either discrete or continuous target variables on a terrain using variable-resolution data received from probabilistic sensors. During a mission, the terrain maps built online are used to plan information-rich trajectories in continuous 3-D space by optimizing initial solutions obtained by a course grid search. Extensive simulations show that our approach is more efficient than existing methods. We also demonstrate its real-time application on a photorealistic mapping scenario using a publicly available dataset.