Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Planning for Discovering and Tracking Multiple Mobile Objects

—We consider the online planning problem for a team of agents to discover and track an unknown and time-varying number of moving objects from onboard sensor measurements with uncertain measurement-object origins. Since the onboard sensors have limited field-of-views, the usual planning strategy base...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Van Nguyen, Hoa, Vo, Ba-Ngu, Vo, Ba-Tuong, Rezatofighi, H., Ranasinghe, D.C.
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2024
Online Access:http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP160101177
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/96498
Description
Summary:—We consider the online planning problem for a team of agents to discover and track an unknown and time-varying number of moving objects from onboard sensor measurements with uncertain measurement-object origins. Since the onboard sensors have limited field-of-views, the usual planning strategy based solely on either tracking detected objects or discovering unseen objects is inadequate. To address this, we formulate a new information-based multi-objective multi-agent control problem, cast as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The resulting multi-agent planning problem is exponentially complex due to the unknown data association between objects and multi-sensor measurements; hence, computing an optimal control action is intractable. We prove that the proposed multi-objective value function is a monotone submodular set function, which admits low-cost suboptimal solutions via greedy search with a tight optimality bound. The resulting planning algorithm has a linear complexity in the number of objects and measurements across the sensors, and quadratic in the number of agents. We demonstrate the proposed solution via a series of numerical experiments with a real-world dataset.