Cooperative tracking using mobile robots and environment-embedded, networked sensors

Abstract

We study the target tracking problem using multiple, environment-embedded, stationary sensors and mobile robots. An architecture for robot motion coordination is presented which exploits a shared topological map of the environment. The stationary sensors and robots maintain region-based density estimates which are used to guide the robots to parts of the environment where unobserved targets may be present. Experiments in simulation show that the region-based approach works better than a naive target following approach when the number of targets in the environment is high.