Robust Multi-Agent Target Tracking in Intermittent Communication Environments via Analytical Belief Merging

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exact analytical solution for decentralized belief merging in multi-agent target tracking, improving accuracy and efficiency in communication-limited environments.

Contribution

It formulates belief merging as KL divergence optimization with closed-form solutions, reducing artifacts and computational complexity, and introduces a spatially-aware weighting strategy.

Findings

Significantly suppresses sensor noise in simulations.

Outperforms standard methods in degraded sensor environments.

Reduces belief merge computation to linear complexity.

Abstract

Autonomous multi-agent target tracking in GPS-denied and communication-restricted environments (e.g., underwater exploration, subterranean search and rescue, and adversarial domains) forces agents to operate independently and only exchange information during brief reconnection windows. Because transmitting complete observation and trajectory histories is bandwidth-exhaustive, exchanging probabilistic belief maps serves as a highly efficient proxy that preserves the topology of agent knowledge. While minimizing divergence metrics to merge these decentralized beliefs is conceptually sound, traditional approaches often rely on numerical solvers that introduce critical quantization errors and artificial noise floors. In this paper, we formulate the decentralized belief merging problem as Forward and Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence optimizations and derive their exact closed-form analytical solutions. By deploying these derivations, we mathematically eliminate optimization artifacts, achieving perfect mathematical fidelity while reducing the computational complexity of the belief merge to $\mathcal{O}(N|S|)$ scalar operations. Furthermore, we propose a novel spatially-aware visit-weighted KL merging strategy that dynamically weighs agent beliefs based on their physical visitation history. Validated across tens of thousands of distributed simulations, extensive sensitivity analysis demonstrates that our proposed method significantly suppresses sensor noise and outperforms standard analytical means in environments characterized by highly degraded sensors and prolonged communication intervals.