Decentralised Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance in Unknown Environments with Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems
This addresses the challenge of coordinated ISR operations for robotics applications, but appears incremental as it builds on existing decentralised and multi-robot methods.
The paper tackles the problem of performing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in unknown environments using a decentralised, heterogeneous multi-robot system, achieving simultaneous exploration and exploitation through practical implementation and simulation.
We present the design and implementation of a decentralised, heterogeneous multi-robot system for performing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in an unknown environment. The team consists of functionally specialised robots that gather information and others that perform a mission-specific task, and is coordinated to achieve simultaneous exploration and exploitation in the unknown environment. We present a practical implementation of such a system, including decentralised inter-robot localisation, mapping, data fusion and coordination. The system is demonstrated in an efficient distributed simulation. We also describe an UAS platform for hardware experiments, and the ongoing progress.