Autonomous sensor placement

With an increasing reliance on robotic platforms to perform scientific exploration in remote or hostile environments, it is becoming crucial that robotic systems be able to perform autonomous intelligent sensor placement as well as autonomous experimental design. Such a system requires encoding of scientific knowledge, the ability to make inferences from data, and the ability to identify the most relevant question to ask given both the instrumentpsilas prior knowledge and the issue it is designed to address. This requires implementation of two computational engines: the inference engine and the inquiry engine. Here we demonstrate our first efforts to develop intelligent instruments that rely on autonomous sensor placement.