Resilience in multi-robot target tracking through reconfiguration


Abstract in English

We address the problem of maintaining resource availability in a networked multi-robot system performing distributed target tracking. In our model, robots are equipped with sensing and computational resources enabling them to track a targets position using a Distributed Kalman Filter (DKF). We use the trace of each robots sensor measurement noise covariance matrix as a measure of sensing quality. When a robots sensing quality deteriorates, the systems communication graph is modified by adding edges such that the robot with deteriorating sensor quality may share information with other robots to improve the teams target tracking ability. This computation is performed centrally and is designed to work without a large change in the number of active communication links. We propose two mixed integer semi-definite programming formulations (an agent-centric strategy and a team-centric strategy) to achieve this goal. We implement both formulations and a greedy strategy in simulation and show that the team-centric strategy outperforms the agent-centric and greedy strategies.

Download