Multi-Agent Belief Sharing through Autonomous Hierarchical Multi-Level Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous hierarchical multi-level clustering method for multi-agent systems, enabling stable communication and belief sharing among UAVs with dynamic participation, demonstrated through wildfire monitoring simulations.

Contribution

The work presents a decentralized hierarchical clustering approach that maintains stability and facilitates belief sharing in dynamic multi-agent environments.

Findings

MLC achieves stable cluster hierarchies under various motion patterns.

Belief sharing via MLC improves coordination in wildfire monitoring scenarios.

The method is applicable to UAV tracking with dynamic agent participation.

Abstract

Coordination in multi-agent systems is challenging for agile robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where relative agent positions frequently change due to unconstrained movement. The problem is exacerbated through the individual take-off and landing of agents for battery recharging leading to a varying number of active agents throughout the whole mission. This work proposes autonomous hierarchical multi-level clustering (MLC), which forms a clustering hierarchy utilizing decentralized methods. Through periodic cluster maintenance executed by cluster-heads, stable multi-level clustering is achieved. The resulting hierarchy is used as a backbone to solve the communication problem for locally-interactive applications such as UAV tracking problems. Using observation aggregation, compression, and dissemination, agents share local observations throughout the hierarchy, giving every agent a total system belief with spatially dependent resolution and freshness. Extensive simulations show that MLC yields a stable cluster hierarchy under different motion patterns and that the proposed belief sharing is highly applicable in wildfire front monitoring scenarios.