Multi-Robot Active Information Gathering with Periodic Communication
This addresses coordination challenges for multi-robot systems in tasks like surveillance, but it is incremental as it applies known methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of coordinating a team of robots with periodic communication for information gathering tasks, showing that Dec-POMDP techniques are applicable and demonstrating feasibility in simulations and real-world target tracking.
A team of robots sharing a common goal can benefit from coordination of the activities of team members, helping the team to reach the goal more reliably or quickly. We address the problem of coordinating the actions of a team of robots with periodic communication capability executing an information gathering task. We cast the problem as a multi-agent optimal decision-making problem with an information theoretic objective function. We show that appropriate techniques for solving decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are applicable in such information gathering problems. We quantify the usefulness of coordinated information gathering through simulation studies, and demonstrate the feasibility of the method in a real-world target tracking domain.