Simulated Annealing for Multi-Robot Ergodic Information Acquisition Using Graph-Based Discretization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wong, Benjamin, Weber, Aaron, Safwat, Mohamed M., Devasia, Santosh, Banerjee, Ashis G.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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_version_ 1866908567942987776
author Wong, Benjamin
Weber, Aaron
Safwat, Mohamed M.
Devasia, Santosh
Banerjee, Ashis G.
author_facet Wong, Benjamin
Weber, Aaron
Safwat, Mohamed M.
Devasia, Santosh
Banerjee, Ashis G.
contents One of the goals of active information acquisition using multi-robot teams is to keep the relative uncertainty in each region at the same level to maintain identical acquisition quality (e.g., consistent target detection) in all the regions. To achieve this goal, ergodic coverage can be used to assign the number of samples according to the quality of observation, i.e., sampling noise levels. However, the noise levels are unknown to the robots. Although this noise can be estimated from samples, the estimates are unreliable at first and can generate fluctuating values. The main contribution of this paper is to use simulated annealing to generate the target sampling distribution, starting from uniform and gradually shifting to an estimated optimal distribution, by varying the coldness parameter of a Boltzmann distribution with the estimated sampling entropy as energy. Simulation results show a substantial improvement of both transient and asymptotic entropy compared to both uniform and direct-ergodic searches. Finally, a demonstration is performed with a TurtleBot swarm system to validate the physical applicability of the algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23214
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulated Annealing for Multi-Robot Ergodic Information Acquisition Using Graph-Based Discretization
Wong, Benjamin
Weber, Aaron
Safwat, Mohamed M.
Devasia, Santosh
Banerjee, Ashis G.
Robotics
Systems and Control
One of the goals of active information acquisition using multi-robot teams is to keep the relative uncertainty in each region at the same level to maintain identical acquisition quality (e.g., consistent target detection) in all the regions. To achieve this goal, ergodic coverage can be used to assign the number of samples according to the quality of observation, i.e., sampling noise levels. However, the noise levels are unknown to the robots. Although this noise can be estimated from samples, the estimates are unreliable at first and can generate fluctuating values. The main contribution of this paper is to use simulated annealing to generate the target sampling distribution, starting from uniform and gradually shifting to an estimated optimal distribution, by varying the coldness parameter of a Boltzmann distribution with the estimated sampling entropy as energy. Simulation results show a substantial improvement of both transient and asymptotic entropy compared to both uniform and direct-ergodic searches. Finally, a demonstration is performed with a TurtleBot swarm system to validate the physical applicability of the algorithm.
title Simulated Annealing for Multi-Robot Ergodic Information Acquisition Using Graph-Based Discretization
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23214