SGER: Impact of Intermittent Networks on Team-based Coverage

University Of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa AL

Investigators

Abstract

Situational awareness is increasingly reliant on unmanned vehicle teams to provide information by constant wide area surveillance. Issues of how to best coordinate the actions of many autonomous agents, individually or in teams, in order to accomplish the search goal of complete and timely coverage are essential for the robust information. Unfortunately, the application of robot teams in coverage tasks has many unaddressed facets of complexity. Specifically, the propagation constraints of networks limit the ability for robot teams to facilitate cooperation using digital networks. In this project, we investigate the cooperation problem with a focus on modeling and experimentation in the presence of real world network constraints. This research project aims to use bio-inspired cooperation paradigms to: 1) improve large-scale search and surveillance by actively predicting and managing network constraints based on role assignment, proximity-based sub-team formation, and communication through observation, 2) study of message age and impact upon performance, and 3) study of proximity to message importance. It is expected that results will be in line with previous work that shows that less communication can result in better cooperation in certain areas and team sizes.