Information Gathering Based Autonomous Online Patrolling Route Planning for Cooperative Loitering Munition Swarm Using Particle Filtering

With the development of autonomous system, the operational use of loitering munition is shifting from the following of a pre-planned fixed route without communication to smart decision making and collaborative cooperation with sharing information. In this paper, we study the autonomous decision making and cooperative control strategy of online patrolling for a swarm of loitering munition using communication to coordinate their route based on maximizing the information they gathered in the operation region. Taking the non-Gaussian non-linear property of airborne radar seeker into account, we utilized a particle filter based method to evaluate or to predict the information quality of each action candidate. We also implemented a coordinate descent scheme to enable a distributed and scalable swarm decision making. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides a better estimation than baselines without the need for external or centralized decision agent.

[1]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Information acquisition with sensing robots: Algorithms and error bounds , 2013, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[2]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Distributed robotic sensor networks: An information-theoretic approach , 2012, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[3]  Lei Guo,et al.  An information aware event-triggered scheme for particle filter based remote state estimation , 2019, Autom..

[4]  Tao Zhu,et al.  Coverage Flight Path Planning for Multi-rotor UAV in Convex Polygon Area , 2019, 2019 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC).

[5]  B. O. Koopman.  The Theory of Search , 1957 .

[6]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Anytime Planning for Decentralized Multirobot Active Information Gathering , 2018, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[7]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Decentralized active information acquisition: Theory and application to multi-robot SLAM , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[8]  L. Stone.  Theory of Optimal Search , 1975 .

[9]  Eric W. Frew,et al.  A Communication-Aware Mutual Information Measure for Distributed Autonomous Robotic Information Gathering , 2019, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[10]  Hassan Hmedi,et al.  Optimal scheduling of multiple sensors which transmit measurements over a dynamic lossy network , 2019, 2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[11]  Tao Zhu,et al.  Cooperative Search Strategies of Multiple UAVs Based on Clustering Using Minimum Spanning Tree , 2018, ICSI.

[12]  George J. Pappas,et al.  A distributed auction algorithm for the assignment problem , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.