RF emitter localization with robotic swarms

Abstract

Swarms of inexpensive, robotic sensors have the potential for revolutionizing intelligence gathering. They self-organize to provide wide apertures, redundancy, attritability, with low probability of detect over a wide area. Coordinating swarm behaviors to provide the necessary apertures and spatial configurations requires novel methods of distributed control that can maintain the positioning accuracy in the face of arbitrary threats and obstacles. In this paper we describe the algorithms to control a swarm of air vehicles with radio frequency receivers that cooperatively search an urban area for radio frequency emitters, self-organize into teams to localize each emitter, and perform coordinated maneuvers to maximize the information gain during the localization operation. The swarm is able to adapt to attrition, performs collision avoidance, and adjusts its trajectories based on the urban terrain. These behaviors were implemented in a ROS-based swarm deployment environment suitable for execution on a small drone and simulated in a 3D model of a small urban area. This paper describes the search and localization tactics employed, the algorithms for implementing those tactics in the swarm, and experimental results. Our companion paper describes the algorithms used for localization.