Sensor Allocation and Online-Learning-based Path Planning for Maritime Situational Awareness Enhancement: A Multi-Agent Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-agent system combining sensor allocation and online learning-based path planning to enhance maritime situational awareness with limited sensors and partial target information.

Contribution

It presents a novel formulation for sensor distribution and path planning considering partial target awareness and trajectory unawareness, with two algorithms including a regret-matching learning approach.

Findings

Achieves faster situational awareness compared to existing methods.

Uses a distributed multi-agent path planning algorithm with quick convergence.

Effectively manages limited sensors and partial target information.

Abstract

Countries with access to large bodies of water often aim to protect their maritime transport by employing maritime surveillance systems. However, the number of available sensors (e.g., cameras) is typically small compared to the to-be-monitored targets, and their Field of View (FOV) and range are often limited. This makes improving the situational awareness of maritime transports challenging. To this end, we propose a method that not only distributes multiple sensors but also plans paths for them to observe multiple targets, while minimizing the time needed to achieve situational awareness. In particular, we provide a formulation of this sensor allocation and path planning problem which considers the partial awareness of the targets' state, as well as the unawareness of the targets' trajectories. To solve the problem we present two algorithms: 1) a greedy algorithm for assigning sensors to targets, and 2) a distributed multi-agent path planning algorithm based on regret-matching learning. Because a quick convergence is a requirement for algorithms developed for high mobility environments, we employ a forgetting factor to quickly converge to correlated equilibrium solutions. Experimental results show that our combined approach achieves situational awareness more quickly than related work.