Informative path planning is an important and challenging problem in robotics that remains to be solved in a manner that allows for wide-spread implementation and real-world practical adoption. Among various reasons for this, one is the lack of approaches that allow for informative path planning in high-dimensional spaces and non-trivial sensor constraints. In this work we present a sampling-based approach that allows us to tackle the challenges of large and high-dimensional search spaces. This is done by performing informed sampling in the high-dimensional continuous space and incorporating potential information gain along edges in the reward estimation. This method rapidly generates a global path that maximizes information gain for the given path budget constraints. We discuss the details of our implementation for an example use case of searching for multiple objects of interest in a large search space using a fixed-wing UAV with a forward-facing camera. We compare our approach to a sampling-based planner baseline and demonstrate how our contributions allow our approach to consistently out-perform the baseline by 18.0%. With this we thus present a practical and generalizable informative path planning framework that can be used for very large environments, limited budgets, and high dimensional search spaces, such as robots with motion constraints or high-dimensional configuration spaces.

7 pages, 5 figures, IROS 2022