Cooperative Robotics for Multi-Target Observation

摘要

An important issue that arises in the automation of many security, surveillance, and reconnaissance tasks is that of observing (or monitoring) the movements of targets navigating in a bounded area of interest. A key research issue in these problems is that of sensor placement | determining where sensors should be located to maintain the targets in view. In complex applications involving limited-range sensors, the use of multiple sensors dynamically moving over time is required. In this article, we investigate the use of a cooperative team of autonomous sensor-based robots for the observation of multiple moving targets (a problem that we termCMOMMT). We focus primarily on developing the distributed control strategies that allow the robot team to attempt to maximize the collective time during which each target is being observed by at least one robot team member in the area of interest. Our initial e orts on this problem address the aspects of distributed control in robot teams with equivalent movement capabilities working in an uncluttered, bounded area. This article rst formalizes the problem and discusses related work. We then present a distributed approximate approach to solving this problem (called A-CMOMMT) that combines low-level multirobot control with higher-level control. The low-level control is described in terms of force elds emanating from the targets and the robots. The higher level control is presented in our ALLIANCE formalism [16, 17], which provides mechanisms for fault tolerant cooperative control, and allows robot team members to adjust their low-level actions based upon the actions of their teammates. We then present the results of the ongoing implementation of our approach, both in simulation and on physical robots. To ourknowledge, this is the rst article addressing this research problem that has been implemented on physical robot teams.