Cooperative multi-robot observation of multiple moving targets
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States). Center for Engineering Systems Advanced Research
- Albion Coll., MI (United States). Dept. of Mathematics
An important issue that arises in the automation of many security, surveillance, and reconnaissance tasks is that of monitoring, or observing, 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 of this type, the use of multiple sensors dynamically moving over time is required. In this paper, the authors investigate the sue of a cooperative team of autonomous sensor-based robots for multi-robot observation of multiple moving targets. They focus primarily on developing the distributed control strategies that allow the robot team to attempt to maximize the collective tie during which each object is being observed by at least one robot in the area of interest. The initial efforts in this problem address the aspects of distributed control in homogeneous robot teams with equivalent sensing and movement capabilities working in an uncluttered, bounded area. This paper first formalizes the problem, discusses related work, and then shows that this problem is NP-hard. They then present a distributed approximate approach to solving this problem that combines low-level multi-robot control with higher-level control.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-96OR22464
- OSTI ID:
- 459407
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-970469-9; ON: DE97003113; TRN: 97:007644
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 1997 international conference on robotics and automation, Albuquerque, NM (United States), 20-25 Apr 1997; Other Information: PBD: [1997]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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