Decentralized Multi-Agent Active Search and Tracking when Targets Outnumber Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Banerjee, Arundhati, Schneider, Jeff
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Banerjee, Arundhati
Schneider, Jeff
author_facet Banerjee, Arundhati
Schneider, Jeff
contents Multi-agent multi-target tracking has a wide range of applications, including wildlife patrolling, security surveillance or environment monitoring. Such algorithms often make restrictive assumptions: the number of targets and/or their initial locations may be assumed known, or agents may be pre-assigned to monitor disjoint partitions of the environment, reducing the burden of exploration. This also limits applicability when there are fewer agents than targets, since agents are unable to continuously follow the targets in their fields of view. Multi-agent tracking algorithms additionally assume inter-agent synchronization of observations, or the presence of a central controller to coordinate joint actions. Instead, we focus on the setting of decentralized multi-agent, multi-target, simultaneous active search-and-tracking with asynchronous inter-agent communication. Our proposed algorithm DecSTER uses a sequential monte carlo implementation of the probability hypothesis density filter for posterior inference combined with Thompson sampling for decentralized multi-agent decision making. We compare different action selection policies, focusing on scenarios where targets outnumber agents. In simulation, we demonstrate that DecSTER is robust to unreliable inter-agent communication and outperforms information-greedy baselines in terms of the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment (OSPA) metric for different numbers of targets and varying teamsizes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decentralized Multi-Agent Active Search and Tracking when Targets Outnumber Agents
Banerjee, Arundhati
Schneider, Jeff
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
I.2.9; I.2.11
Multi-agent multi-target tracking has a wide range of applications, including wildlife patrolling, security surveillance or environment monitoring. Such algorithms often make restrictive assumptions: the number of targets and/or their initial locations may be assumed known, or agents may be pre-assigned to monitor disjoint partitions of the environment, reducing the burden of exploration. This also limits applicability when there are fewer agents than targets, since agents are unable to continuously follow the targets in their fields of view. Multi-agent tracking algorithms additionally assume inter-agent synchronization of observations, or the presence of a central controller to coordinate joint actions. Instead, we focus on the setting of decentralized multi-agent, multi-target, simultaneous active search-and-tracking with asynchronous inter-agent communication. Our proposed algorithm DecSTER uses a sequential monte carlo implementation of the probability hypothesis density filter for posterior inference combined with Thompson sampling for decentralized multi-agent decision making. We compare different action selection policies, focusing on scenarios where targets outnumber agents. In simulation, we demonstrate that DecSTER is robust to unreliable inter-agent communication and outperforms information-greedy baselines in terms of the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment (OSPA) metric for different numbers of targets and varying teamsizes.
title Decentralized Multi-Agent Active Search and Tracking when Targets Outnumber Agents
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
I.2.9; I.2.11
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03154