Papaioannou, Savvas (KIOS CoE, University of Cyprus), Kim, Sungjin (Hanyang University), Laoudias, Christos (University of Cyprus), Kolios, Panayiotis (University of Cyprus), Kim, Sunwoo (Hanyang University), Theocharides, Theocharis (University of Cyprus), Panayiotou, Christos (University of Cyprus), Polycarpou, Marios M. (University of Cyprus)

Coordinated CRLB-Based Control for Tracking Multiple First Responders in 3D Environments

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "UAS Applications V" (FrB3), Friday, September 4, 2020, 12:30−12:50, Edessa

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), September 1-4, 2020 (Postponed from June 9-12, 2020), Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 26, 2024

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of tracking a team of first responders with a fleet of autonomous mobile flying agents, operating in 3D environments. We assume that the first responders exhibit stochastic dynamics and evolve inside challenging environments with obstacles and occlusions. As a result, the mobile agents probabilistically receive noisy line-of-sight (LoS), as well as non-line-of-sight (NLoS) range measurements from the first responders. In this work, we propose a novel estimation (i.e., estimating the position of multiple first responders over time) and control (i.e., controlling the movement of the agents) framework based on the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). More specifically, we analytically derive the CRLB of the measurement likelihood function which we use as a control criterion to select the optimal joint control actions over all agents, thus achieving optimized tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-agent multi-target estimation and control framework is demonstrated through an extensive simulation analysis.