Definition

Informative Path Planning (IPP) seeks to design trajectories that maximize the ‘amount of information’ collected subject to budgetary constraints such as total energy or time. This can be formalized as solving the following maximization problem: $$\mathcal{P}^{*}=\underset{\mathcal{P}\in\Psi}{\arg\max} \,I(\mathcal{P}):c(\mathcal{P})\le B$$where: - $\Psi$ is the space of possible trajectories - $B$ is the budget (or constraint) - $c$ is the cost function - $I(\mathcal{P})$ is the information provided by the trajectory

Source

Hollinger, Geoffrey A., and Gaurav S. Sukhatme. “Sampling-based Motion Planning for Robotic Information Gathering.” Robotics: Science and Systems. Vol. 3. No. 5. 2013.