用预期自由能统一规划机器人探火星路径,兼顾找资源与省成本。
Expected Free Energy-based Informative Path Planning for Robotic Mars Exploration

- 基于主动推理的预期自由能指导路径规划,兼顾信息获取与能耗控制。
- 在有限路径长度下,同时生成高精度地图并定位高价值区域。
- 方法原理清晰易调,适合需自主决策的深空探测任务。
自主机器人在未知环境(如火星寻找水源)中探索时,面临双重挑战:既要快速发现高价值区域,又要构建准确的信息地图,同时还需承担每米移动和每次测量的成本。传统信息探索或奖励导向策略仅关注单一目标。本文提出将预期自由能(Expected Free Energy, EFE)作为预算约束下的统一行动选择准则,源自主动推理的严格理论框架。代理在信息场上的信念采用高斯过程建模,规划连续轨迹以最小化预期自由能,且满足严格的路径长度限制。多次实验结果表明,在相同条件下,基于EFE的规划能同时生成精确的后验地图并定位最高价值区域,优于经典信息论基线。该方法为机器人自主探索提供了统一、可调、符合物理约束的信息采集策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes. Classical information-seeking and reward-seeking criteria address only one of these objectives at a time. Here, we propose Expected Free Energy (EFE), the principled action-selection objective from active inference, as a unifying criterion for budgeted robotic informative path planning. Maintaining a Gaussian-process belief over the information field, our agent plans continuous trajectories that minimize expected free energy under hard path-length constraints. The results from multiple realizations show that EFE-based planning yields accurate posterior maps and locates the highest-value regions simultaneously, outperforming information-theoretic baselines under the same settings. In robotic exploration, these unified, easy-to-tune principled information-gathering strategies facilitate autonomous deployment while enforcing efficiency and resource constraints.
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