Mission-informed planning improves mobile gas inspection reliability
MIRA-PRM: Mission-Informed Reusable Roadmap Planning for Mobile Gas-Sensing Inspection
Robotics
Summary
Planning paths for mobile robots to inspect gas levels at specific spots can be tricky. The authors created MIRA-PRM, a new method that helps robots find reliable routes that visit ordered targets efficiently. It improves success rates and reduces repair time compared to older planning methods. Tests show it works well in many simulated scenarios and careful checks confirm its paths avoid obstacles safely.
What this means in practice
- •For industrial inspection teams: Plan reliable routes for mobile gas sensors to efficiently gather samples in complex environments with multiple ordered targets.
- •For robotics software developers: Incorporate mission-informed roadmap methods to improve repeated query adaptation and local path repairs in mobile inspection robots.
Authors
Gongsen Wang, Siyuan Wang, Xinyuan Wang, Yuhan Wen, Feng Yang, Zhen Tian, Hoi Leong Lee
Abstract
Mobile gas-sensing inspection requires a mobile platform to reliably reach ordered sampling poses. We present MIRA-PRM, a mission-informed probabilistic roadmap that combines geometry-, mission-flow-, and inspection-conditioned sampling with locally adaptive connectivity and evidence-gated refinement. Eight development campaigns comprising 142,448 planner runs evaluated mission scaling, repeated-query adaptation, finite node budgets, target distributions, local map repair, ablation, cross-family comparison, and parameter sensitivity. MIRA-PRM maintained 100% seed-level success as ordered targets increased from two to eight, and achieved 97.67% seed-level success under a 40-node ceiling, compared with 67.17% for PRM and 86.50% for PRM*. Local repair reduced event time by 79.9-81.9% and node additions by 90.8-94.3% relative to rebuilding. On a separate frozen holdout of 12 maps, 48 ordered missions, and three seeds per map-mission unit, MIRA-PRM produced 96/144 validated successes, versus 82/144 for PRM, 89/144 for PRM*, and 70/144 for LE-HG-PRM. On paired common-success runs, MIRA-PRM reduced wall time by 16.89% relative to PRM* and 81.01% relative to LE-HG-PRM, but was 52.23% slower than PRM; paths were 0.54-1.86% longer. All validated paths passed independent full-segment checks and clearance non-inferiority. The results support a reliability-oriented trade-off in structured simulations and motivate external-map and physical mobile-sensing validation.