Environment Prediction from Sparse Samples for Robotic Information Gathering

Robots often require a model of their environment to make informed decisions. In unknown environments, the ability to infer the value of a data field from a limited number of samples is essential to many robotics applications. In this work, we propose a neural network architecture to model these spatially correlated data fields based on a limited number of spatially continuous samples. Additionally, we provide a method based on biased loss functions to suggest future areas of exploration to minimize reconstruction error. We run simulated robotic information gathering trials on both the MNIST hand written digits dataset and a Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) ocean dataset for ocean monitoring. Our method outperforms Gaussian process regression in both environments for modeling the data field and action selection.