Decentralised Coordination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Target Search using the Max-Sum Algorithm

Abstract

This paper considers the coordination of a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are deployed to search for a moving target within a continuous space. We present an online and decentralised coordination mechanism, based on the max-sum algorithm, to address this problem. In doing so, we introduce a novel coordination technique to the field of robotic search, and we extend the max-sum algorithm beyond the much simpler coordination problems to which it has been applied to date. Within a simulation environment, we benchmarked our max-sum algorithm against three other existing approaches for coordinating UAVs. The results showed that coordination with the max sum algorithm out-performed a best response algorithm, which represents the state of the art in the coordination of UAVs for search, by up to 26%. The results further showed that the max-sum algorithm out-performed an implicitly coordinated approach, where the coordination arises from the agents making decisions based on a common belief, by up to 34% and finally a non-coordinated approach by up to 68%.