Real-Time Distributed Infrastructure-free Searching and Target Tracking via Virtual Pheromones

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully distributed, infrastructure-free multi-agent system that uses virtual pheromones for efficient environment coverage and target tracking, demonstrated on a multi-robotic platform.

Contribution

It presents a novel pheromone-based distributed control algorithm for multi-agent search and tracking in unknown environments, including real-world robotic implementation.

Findings

Effective coverage with minimal overlap

Successful target detection and tracking

Implementation on LTA multi-robot system

Abstract

Actively searching for targets using a multi-agent system in an unknown environment poses a two-pronged problem, where on the one hand we need agents to cover as much of the environment as possible with little overlap and on the other hand the agents must coordinate among themselves to select and track targets thereby maximizing detection performance. This paper proposes a fully distributed solution for an ad hoc network of agents to cooperatively search for targets and monitor them in an unknown infrastructure-free environment. The solution combines a distributed pheromone-based coverage control strategy with a distributed target selection mechanism. We further expand the scope to show the implementation of the proposed algorithm on a Lighter Than Air (LTA) multi-robotic system that can search and track objects in priori unknown locations.