Controlling a Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Collect Uncertain Information in a Threat Environment

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been proved to be successful and efficient for information collection in a modern battlefield, especially in areas that are considered to be dangerous for human pilots. Currently, a UAV is remotely controlled by a ground station through frequent data communications, which make the current system vulnerable in a threat environment. We propose a decentralized control strategy while requiring UAVs to maintain radio silence during the entire mission. The strategy is analyzed based on a scenario where a fleet of vehicles is assigned to search and collect uncertain information in a set of regions within a given mission time. We demonstrate that a region-sharing strategy is beneficial even when there is no extra reward gained from additional information collection. Implementing a region-sharing strategy requires solving a decentralized time allocation problem, which is computationally intractable. To overcome this, an approximate formulation is developed under an independence...