Resilient Multi-Robot Multi-Target Tracking

Abstract

We address the problem of ensuring resource availability in a networked multi-robot system performing distributed target tracking. Specifically, we consider a multi-target tracking scenario where the targets are driven by exogenous inputs that are unknown to the robots performing the tracking task. Robots track the positions of targets using a form of the Distributed Kalman Filter (DKF). We use the trace of each robot’s sensor measurement noise covariance matrix as a measure of its sensing quality. When a robot’s sensing quality deteriorates, the team’scommunication graph is modified by adding edges such that the robot with deteriorating sensor quality may share information with other robots to improve the team’s target tracking ability. This computation is performed centrally and is designed to work without a large change in the number of active inter-robot communication links. Our method generates coordinates for the robots such the new communication graph can be realized in 3D. To achieve this, we propose two mixed integer semi-definite programming formulations, namely an ‘agent-centric’ strategy and a ‘team-centric’ strategy. We implement both formulations and a greedy, baseline strategy in simulation. Our simulation results show that the team-centric approach outperforms both agent-centric and greedy methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of our method in real-world settings through a multirobot experiment performed in real-time.