Informed Scientific Sampling in Large-scale Outdoor Environments

One of the major applications of mobile robotics is exploring and mapping an unknown environmental field. Persistent spatio-temporal maps of environmental phenomena have a critical role in understanding the interplay between the changing global conditions and human activities that might be causing these changes. Building such persistent maps of environmental fields for a given region over a period of time requires continuous sensing. This problem has been tackled previously by deploying a network of static sensor nodes uniformly across the region of interest or by conducting a uniform survey of the region. In general, however, environmental fields of interest are non-uniform over a given region and dynamic over a time period. Persistent mapping of such fields requires the mobile robots which selectively sense and are aimed at reducing cost and increasing flexibility when compared to static sensors. In this workshop, we aim at understanding the progress in the field of robotic sampling for monitoring large-scale outdoor environments, such as forests, large water bodies, agricultural fields, and complex urban settings. We also plan to focus and learn about the challenges faced by researchers in mapping and understanding these difficult environments. This workshop is aimed at providing a complete overview of the research related to field robotics in aerial, forest, urban, and marine applications. We plan to discuss a series of research issues that include measurement collection and evaluation, communication between multiple data-sampling robots, data fusion, sensor motion, pollution monitoring, and wildlife tracking. Regardless of the applications, all these tasks aim at information acquisition.