Evolutionary Computation for Sensor Planning: The Task Distribution Plan

Autonomous sensor planning is a problem of interest to scientists in the fields of computer vision, robotics, and photogrammetry. In automated visual tasks, a sensing planner must make complex and critical decisions involving sensor placement and the sensing task specification. This paper addresses the problem of specifying sensing tasks for a multiple manipulator workcell given an optimal sensor placement configuration. The problem is conceptually divided in two different phases: activity assignment and tour planning . To solve such problems, an optimization methodology based on evolutionary computation is developed. Operational limitations originated from the workcell configuration are considered using specialized heuristics as well as a floating-point representation based on the random keys approach. Experiments and performance results are presented.