Multi-robot Coordination for Elusive Target Interception Aided by Sensor Networks

This paper presents a multi-robot coordination architecture for a robot-sensor network to track and intercept targets. For a target tracking and interception task, the sensor network continuously tracks the targets and dynamically selects robots to intercept the target. The robots are navigated through the sensor network. The main contribution of this paper lies on providing a scalable, power saving robot selection algorithm for the sensor networks. The robot selection algorithm is addressed based on partitioning among sensor nodes. Through partitioning, the sensor nodes are grouped so that they know which robot to choose if it is the closest to the target. The partitioning is updated with respect to the movement of robots. The proposed algorithms are proven to be effective and verified by simulations. Some analytic investigation on the communication overhead in the sensor networks is also provided